The Final Zone project

This blog is written on Fedora 25 Design Suite running on ASUS X550ZE .The upgrade from Design Suite 24 to 25 using Gnome Software went smooth with very little impact to the entire system. Fedora 25 Design Suite with supported Dedicated Graphic card on a hybrid laptop Inheriting the features from Fedora 25 Workstation , Design Suite now gained further support of hybrid hardware notably laptops (see above feature). Following the release cycle, supplemental wallpapers from Fedora 23 are replaced by their 25th version to mark the end of life of the 23rd release next month. Design received new applications like Gnome Books useful for e-books and Calendar to easily manage the schedule.   To enable full support of hotkeys and optimal power management due to the boot scheme bug in Linux kernel, 4.9.0rc4 or above (currently residing in Rawhide nodebug repository at the time of writing) is required and will soon reach availability via update. The case applied to some hybrid...

LuxRender plugin now selectable on Blender in Software The official release of Fedora 25 Design Suite is nearby with the following changes: Inheriting the features from Fedora Workstation, it is now possible to rename several files. Blender just reaches 2.78a with several bugs fixes. Non-western speaking users will delight the issues related to the interface is fixed. LuxRender plugin for Blender  is updated to 1.6 bring new features. That version no longer supports 32 bit architectures known as x86. In addition, the plugin is now visible as addon for Blender in Software . Sadly, Yafaray plugin for Blender is currently retired from the Fedora repository thus dropped from the default selection. It is still available for the previous release. The plan is to bring it back for the next release as I took over as packager. Some applications like Gpick are unable to properly run on the default Wayland session and needs X session. New fonts are available Grand Hotel and...

Following the previous blog about missing Design Suite on the release, the Quality Assurance team made it possible for Fedora 24. Feel free to download it , play with it and read about the features . Sadly due to a bug from the new Fedora building system caused by dnf, all plugins for Gimp, Inkscape and Blender are missing for this Design Suite. They can be installed via Gnome Software or through command line.

Bad news: Design Suite image for Fedora 24 will be unavailable as default on the official release due to several issues linked to the livemedia building system I have no control. Possible workaround: on the slight good news, recent successful built image is available for testing although it did not make the cut for the general release. Unfortunately, due to a bug inside the packaging manager dnf , add-ons are missing for both Blender, Gimp and Inkscape. Worse, by the time I applied the workaround , the freeze status for Labs release was in effect with the migration of kickstart system to Pagure . Alternate method will be to download and install Fedora Workstation then apply the command from the terminal sudo dnf group install design-suite Difference is missing documentations related to Design Suite and supplemental wallpapers. The focus is now toward Fedora 25 where all unexpected kinks will be sorted out.

Inspired by the article from Fedora Magazine , Design Suite received more treatment for Fedora 24 release. Among the features are: Gimp gained new plugins: Layer via Copy/Cut and Save on Web now available on Fedora repository gimpfx-foundry returns from retirement in repository Resynthesizer for Gimp in Fedora now updated to 2.0 Inclusion Gthumb for easier renaming image files on the live media Darktable is now easier to access via the main dock on Gnome Shell. A big thanks to Riley Brandt for the feedback , Design Team other Fedora contributors notably  Gil Cattaneo and Mukundan Ragavan for making missing packages available.

Gnokii tags me about Riley Brandt Photography Youtube video featuring Fedora 23 Design Suite first look . Highlighted positive comments are the default applications, plugins and more color management for photographers. Enjoy!

Darktable is no longer available for 32-bits x86 devices since version 2.0. Calligra Krita will be available as default alongside MyPaint to match the Lab section website . Majority of features come from Fedora Workstation taking advantage of Gnome Shell technology. More tutorials . Users are welcome to add them. On technical side, the spec file uses design-suite group list for better synchronization (user can install the suite package with the command dnf install @design-suite ).

Stable release of Fedora 23  Design Suite is now available with minimal changes like the inclusion of supplemental wallpapers posted from Nuancier. After installation on ASUS X550ZE laptop , no apparent change of the status is in sight. However, some hotkeys (home,end,pgup,pgdn) are functional. The author of asus-nb-wmi allowing to setup these hotkeys mentioned the inability to reach ASUS developers to address these common issues plaguing many ASUS laptops users and the lack of documentation. Backlight is currently broken due to the controller issues as display on boot so bug is filed : [     7.684288] [drm:radeon_acpi_init [radeon]] *ERROR* Cannot find a backlight controller Battery optimization is still an issue due to the driver choosing to use a powerful GPU rather the power saving mode. AMD is currently working on new driver structure. Dual Radeon is currently unsupported but works are under way .

Fedora Magazine did a good job exposing more Fedora Labs notably Fedora 23 Design Suite Beta. No much update occurred other than the tutorial section currently under work thanks to one of notable contributors Andrew Walton, who also provided one of his excellent pictures available as part of Fedora 23 wallpaper. Final phase will be tweaking and update the tutorials on the wiki section before passing to the incoming 24 release. Feedback is welcome for users looking to have their favourites applications and fonts included by default as long they abide to Fedora Project policies .

For artists and designers (i.e. graphics and web), Fedora 22 Design Suite is now available and received a new website located on https://labs.fedoraproject.org/en/design-suite/ . Listed features from the wiki : Now based on Fedora Workstation media . Addition of Sparkleshares, PDF Mod and Shutter applications. Inclusion of plugins for Blender (Lux Render and YaFaRay) and Inkscape (Sozi and Table). Latest versions of Entangle (0.7.0) and Inkscape (0.91) Gimp gained a new G'Mic plugin replacing Greycstation as default. Two shortcut icons for documentation of both Design Suite and Design Team Updated the list of tutorials related to design Users preferring installing  Fedora Workstation from network can add Design Suite category from the installer.

I recently bought an ASUS X550ZE to replace the venerable Sony VAIO N250E laptop. The reason of choosing an AMD powered laptop is for long term support i.e. the use of Vulkan API in future AMD GPU driver. In summary, here is the ASUS X550ZE specification taken from ASUS website : Processor AMD® APU A10-7400P /A8-7200P/FX-7600P Processor Chipset AMD A76M FCH Memory DDR3L 1600 MHz SDRAM, 8 GB Display 15.6" 16:9 /Full HD (1920x1080) Graphic AMD Radeon® R5 M230 + Radeon® R7 M265 DX Dual Graphics with 2GB DDR3 VRAM Built-in A10-7400P Storage 2.5" 9.5mm SATA 1TB 5400/7200 RPM Optical Drive Super-Multi DVD Card Reader 2 -in-1 card reader ( SD/ SDHC/ MMC) Camera VGA Web Camera Networking Integrated 802.11 b/g/n Built-in Bluetooth™ V4.0 (Optional) 10/100/1000/Gigabits Base T Interface 1 x COMBO audio jack 1 x VGA port/Mini D-sub 15-pin for external monitor 2 x USB 3.0 port(s) 1 x RJ45 LAN Jack for LAN insert 1 x HDMI Audio Built-in ...

Design Suite Alpha 22 is available for downloading along the Workstation edition of Fedora 22 Alpha which is based. The spins includes plugins for both Gimp (Gmic), Inkscape (support of making tables) and Blender (LuxRender). Shutter, a screenshot tool for desktop, is  added at the request of Design Team. More documentations related to Design Suite and Design Team are added for informing users, however known issue is swapped names of the correct url address which is fixed for beta release. In addition, the installer received similar updates for users looking to use Design related group of packages via either Server  edition or other spin variants.

It appears GMIC is now available in Fedora repository meaning it will be included in Design Suite 21 as replacement of the obsolete GREYstoration by default. That plugin is very useful for the excellent tutorials from Pat David who also contributed to the GMIC project thus removing the need to manually compile and install it.

Design Suite Live Spin has a shortcut for a list of tutorials related to graphical art and visual studio. The actual link is on http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Design_Suite/Tutorials which needs more links for tutorials using free and open source tools.

Based on the good writing about the goal of Fedora.next by Adam Williamson, Design Suite may be made on top of Fedora Workstation as the logical choice. Doing so will help focusing on key areas like configurations and proper distribution of applications to display better technologies (For example, Design Suite is using AppFolder provided by Gnome Shell as default). Fedora Workstation is a base with the ability to add group package like Design Packages in this case. Only difference with the spin is the optimization while staying close to upstream.

Design Suite includes new tool like Gimp Paint Studio and Phatch. Inkscape course icon has moved under the tutorials section made in Design Suite wiki. If you have more tutorials you would like to add, simply edit the wiki section.

Hard to believe it is already more than six month I maintained Design Suite. Looking at the previous release, I have been encouraged by some Suite users about the successful launch despite a minor issue from some applications notably Cinepaint. I missed the first ever Flock event as I deemed unready to present the suite yet and I had other commitments. However, Máirín's excellent recap allowed me to follow the activities of the project for more inspirations. For the 20th release of Fedora, I looked at similar suite like Ubuntu Studio website for inspiration purpose. Showing the application with pictures are good highlights meaning the Wiki section will have some updates. Design Suite using Gnome Shell as a base will enable the category, customize the dock to highlight the main graphical applications and include some tutorials. New applications and plugins for Gimp and an extension for Inkscape named sozi are added. One of package that will be hopefully available on repositor...