Linux and Cinepaint Woes

Cinepaint is a great program. I've been using it in Fedora 10 for quite a while now. Cinepaint started out as "Film Gimp" which was used in a lot of features like Harry potter, Stuart Little, Planet of the Apes and many more. I am not really sure if Film Gimp was a proprietary software which then turned open source, but from what I know, Rhythm & Hues had a major role in it's development.

Unfortunately, I haven't been able to get it to work ever since I switched to CentOS 5. Unlike Fedora, it's not available in the base repository. Which means, you are left with the grunt work to find and manually compile all the dependencies. Oh, the horror!

Albeit a tedious task, I decided it was worth having Cinepaint in my workflow. At the time of this writing, most of the dependencies required to install Cinepaint are not available in the base CentOS repository. But, I was able to make this task a lot less painful by enabling EPEL and RPMforge.

So far, the closest I've come to get Cinepaint working is by installing it from CVS. But, the bash script provided by Cinepaint to install from CVS will automatically run autogen.sh, which in-turn generates the configuration files necessary to run ./confiure. By trying to install it this way,I soon realized that a lot of things have gone wrong. The ./configure complains that a lot of libraries are missing (even if it's installed) and if it's already installed, I should add them to PKG_CONFIG_PATH.

I decided not to completely rely on the install script that I downloaded from cinepaint.org and do a little manual tweaking. I removed the part which would run autogen.sh and ./configure from the Install script. And now, all the install script does is download all the required source files from CVS. In order to make ./configure see all the necessary libraries, I could have added all the necessary paths to my .bashrc file, but instead, I chose to edit my configure.in file (included in the Cinepaint directory that I just downloaded).

I added the following lines in configure.in (using the : to include multiple locations):

/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig:/usr/local/bin:/usr/local/lib64/pkgconfig:/usr/local/lib:/usr/local/lib64

Now when I ran the autogen.sh file, it made the appropriate changes to the configure file and I was able to run ./confiure successfully (I chose not to include a --prefix and just let it install to the default directory, which is : /usr/local/share).

After running make and make install, everything seemed to work correctly! Great! If I type Cinepaint into my terminal, it launches. Yaaay!

But no, there is a problem. It turns out that there was something wrong with my Oyranos installation. Cinepaint launched without problems, but it felt really slow and sluggish. With a lot of errors showing up on the terminal.

The only version of Oyranos that compiled and ran without any problems is 0.1.7, but that doesn't seem to be supported by Cinepaint 0.25. The older versions might, but installing from CVS was my last option and had already tried and given up getting the older versions to compile correctly.

So, if you have had this problem before, and know how to get around it, please, I would love to hear from you!

Until then, I'll be happy with whatever I have. I am definitely sticking with CentOS; barring the horrible boot up time, it's a very stable operating system.

Thanks for reading!

-Ashin