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I've been using a Wacom Graphire3 tablet (a little 4x6 style tablet) with Linux for a few years now. At first it was a bit of a pain to set up, but recent versions of Ubuntu (and Debian too I would expect) have been virtually painless. I've used it mostly with the Gimp and MyPaint (which has great potential btw), and a little bit with Inkscape too. I'm not sure how well it will work for writing text and mind maps. When you use it with the Gimp, you will likely have to do a bit of tweaking (there are plenty of posts on the internets about it) and you'll likely need to start with quite a large canvas to get the resolution for hand-drawing a detailed mind map.

One problem I've found with the Gimp is that it (tablet response) can start to slow down if you're using the tablet with a large brush for large scale photo shading etc. which is really a big peeve of mine. MyPaint seems to handle large brush response *much* better than the Gimp I think. Not sure why.

Anyways, I've found the tablet to be very useful and well worth the purchase. Although obviously I'd love to get a larger one or win the lottery and get a Wacom Cintiq!

RQ

Thanks for the great comments!

I made the background using the following simple process:

1. I find a nice texture that I like. I find the stuff at http://cgtextures.com can be good, but there are other sources for nice big free paper textures if you look hard enough. This seems to be potentially a useful post too: http://slodive.com/freebies/158-paper-t … s-designs/

2. I opened the paper jpeg up in Gimp and convert it to greyscale. Even maybe invert it. Play with it a bit using levels etc. Depends. But I want to end up with a greyscale texture of some sort.

3. I bring that greyscale texture into Inkscape and use it as a mask over my plain coloured rectangle (Object->Mask->Set). Depending on how you do step 2. you can get different effects. The darkness of the mask image decides how opaque the colours in your inkscape object show up. It's good for mimicing textures.

I used the same exact technique (with a much less subtle texture) for these ones a while back: http://crunchbanglinux.org/forums/topic … t-colours/

It doesn't always work great (that step 2 makes a huge difference to the outcome).

I think it's just something that is front and centre at the moment. It's a major change. I assume by the next release it won't be so 'top of mind' with people.

@safetycopy - lol. But you can't get that close to his door. You'd have to get someone to lower the drawbridge so you could get over the moat full of laserbeam-equipped sharks.

@khaled @corenominal - glad you like it. Trying to spend a little more time creating stuff that I have been of late.

I use Inkscape, Gimp and Blender 2.50 mostly. Though for raw conversions I use RawStudio (which rocks btw), and sometimes UFRaw. For colour scheme work I've been playing with the web tool at http://colorschemedesigner.com/  which is nice because it can export a Gimp palette which I then normally use as a palette in Inkscape.

I've completely given up on F-spot but have recently tried using Picasa3 under wine. As ugly as that sounds, it's about 400x better than F-spot even under wine. The face recognition capabilities are great for someone who's as lazy about tagging photos as I am. After not using it for a version or two, I was amazed (and a little bit scared as a FLOSS fan) at how far it has come as far as the casual photographer is concerned.

Also I've been playing with MyPaint and my wacom tablet

Ahh.. nevermind. Solved it:

It turns out that you need to make sure you've got an .xscreensaver file in your home directory (I didn't) and in that file, I had to add the following line:

imageDirectory: /home/richard/photos/test

Without this, you'll get the coloured bars and not the images. Obviously you'll replace that path with whatever path you want for your photos.

This didn't seem to do anything for me.

Fortunately, that tint2 setting of "taskbar_mode = multi_desktop" actually does a great job! It separates the icons for each desktop so you can easily tell what is where and switch between them all. Here's a screenie with various apps on various desktops. You'll see the icons for each spread across the taskbar. Nice!

Yup.. I can Win+Tab (I think) to bring up the middle-click menu, but I wanted to just be able to alt-tab between all my apps. Oh well, thought there might be a way.

Actually, I'm using Tint2. I wonder if there is a way to get it to show icons for all apps on all desktops instead of just the current desktop. That may get me what I'm looking for. I'll have to look into it.

Another nice feature that I'd love to see on Openbox (left a message on the openbox mailing list about this with no response yet) is to have a key combo that would minimize all the apps on the desktop except the one that's active. I think you can do this in Fluxbox, but I haven't found a way to do it with Openbox. I tried combining ShowDesktop with a Focus command, but can't seem to get it to work.

Thanks for all the responses.