Another "windows software on Linux" question

I'm in the pre-installation phase with Ubuntu, having never worked with *nix before in my life, I'm cautiously but eagerly trying to ween myself away from Windows dependency. That being said I have an older Graphire 2 Wacom tablet and I'm hoping to use it with Ubuntu. From what I've seen the Linux Wacom Project is probably where I need to get started with that.

But now for the part I'm not so sure about... Is there a good art/sketching program out there that will work on Ubuntu? I currently use Autodesk Sketchbook Pro 1.1 which is freakin' awesome for, well, sketching. The problem is that it's a Windows App. Is anyone aware of a program that's comparable for Linux?

I'm pretty sure I'm still going to be dual booting into Windows for games and for PhotoshopCS, but I'd like to move as much as I can away from XP.

Does anyone have any thoughts? Thanks everyone!

Ubuntu is a fine distro on which to wean yourself from Windows. It come with wacom drivers installed and The Gimp. From what you have learned from the linux-wacom project, you should be just fine. The best part? You download and burn the Ubuntu live cd ISO to see how it it handles without adding/changing/removing so much as a single bit from your hard drive.

also, there is the WINE (Wine is Not an Emulator), project. Which allows windows binaries to be run in Linux. Its not perfect, and most apps take some hacking to get working. There is a large community and guides for most software.

www.winehq.com

http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iId=7919
(Although as it points out it was last tried with a old version of wine from the begging of 2007. There have been many changes, it might work better now, or not at all, just try and see.....post up any error you have and we'll try to help you get it working)

Dice, Shelnutt2:

Wow, thanks guys! Those are some great resources for me to look at, I'll definitely check those out. It seems like I will probably be able to get up and running without too much weirdness, though I of course anticipate complications along the way .

Currently I'm running XP and all my drives that store *all* my data are formatted with NTFS. I don't recall if there's a way to convert from NTSF to FAT32 so that Linux AND XP can both access the data (I'm going to be starting with a dual boot setup).

What's a good way/practice to handle these sorts of situations where you want data to be accessible by the different OSes and are already stuck with a certain format?

Toasty_Squirrel said:

Dice, Shelnutt2:

Wow, thanks guys! Those are some great resources for me to look at, I'll definitely check those out. It seems like I will probably be able to get up and running without too much weirdness, though I of course anticipate complications along the way .

Currently I'm running XP and all my drives that store *all* my data are formatted with NTFS. I don't recall if there's a way to convert from NTSF to FAT32 so that Linux AND XP can both access the data (I'm going to be starting with a dual boot setup).

What's a good way/practice to handle these sorts of situations where you want data to be accessible by the different OSes and are already stuck with a certain format?

Click to expand...

Linux users can now (and have been able to for a while) mount ntfs partitions read/write and use them efficiently. I use ntfs on a few hard drives, and have no problems writing to them from linux.

http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_NTFS_write_with_ntfs-3g

^^^
Yeah, NTFS-3g has been around for awhile now, and Ubuntu at least has had FUSE/ntfs-read abilities built in for awhile as well.

7.10 includes NTFS read and write support by default.

Toasty_Squirrel said:

Dice, Shelnutt2:

Wow, thanks guys! Those are some great resources for me to look at, I'll definitely check those out. It seems like I will probably be able to get up and running without too much weirdness, though I of course anticipate complications along the way .

Currently I'm running XP and all my drives that store *all* my data are formatted with NTFS. I don't recall if there's a way to convert from NTSF to FAT32 so that Linux AND XP can both access the data (I'm going to be starting with a dual boot setup).

What's a good way/practice to handle these sorts of situations where you want data to be accessible by the different OSes and are already stuck with a certain format?

Click to expand...

You are welcome. Let us know how it worked out. +1 for NTFS-3g. It just works!