One of the things holding me back from a total move from Windows to Linux was the lack of (or my mistaken belief of) a way to process Canon’s RAW .CR2 files. As an amateur photographer, I take all my photos in RAW format, to give me the greatest control over the final image. I have been using a Photoshop for some time to process RAW files, and this is the main reason that I am still have Windows on my main computer (Ubuntu 7.04 runs on an old Athlon 1GHz machine). Anyhow, a bit of research revealed that Gimp (the image editor that comes with Ubuntu as standard) has a RAW conversion module add-on. Last night I installed it, simply (I really love Linux) with the command;
sudo apt-get install gimp-ufraw
And lo-and behold, I have a RAW editor on my knackered old Athlon / Linux machine. Here is a screenshot:
So really there is now little holding me back from fully converting to open source home computing, other than the fact that I am still an old dog when it comes to computers, and old habits die hard!
I suppose I can always keep a copy of Windows on the second hard drive, and dual boot, for those occasions that I may actually need it?
