Linux on Raghukamath – Digital Painter and Freelance Illustrator from India

Setting up Debian Linux with Btrfs, KDE Plasma for a creative workstation

Fri, 20 Oct 2023 21:17:07 +0000

Hello Everyone 👋🏽, recently I distro-hopped to Debian Linux from Fedora Linux. And I thought I should write down all the steps that I did during this migration and installation of Debian to use it as my creative workstation. This can be of help for me in the future as a reference note and also for others. You can skip this introduction and jump right into the steps and get started.

Choice of Linux Distribution

A few years back I used Arch Linux and then I switched to Fedora. Arch was nice and it did not give me any trouble, but as I get old I am trying to save time here and there and spend it with my family and Arch requires some maintenance.

So I switched to Fedora and used it for roughly 2 years, but recently when a new change was made in Fedora, I was made aware by the community that I was unwise in my decision to choose it. I and probably other artists are not the target audience of Fedora, as it is a cutting/leading-edge distribution that may or may not be suited to be used as a production machine. Since Fedora’s mission includes “ Features, First” it means that it tries to adopt new technology and pushes the Linux desktop ahead to shake out bugs before anyone else! In my opinion, it is a beta testing distribution not meant to be used in a production environment for people other than developers. People do use it as a production machine, it is a subjective thing, but whenever an event or change in Fedora happens by which your workflow is affected many will gladly point this thing to you, as it was very graciously pointed out to me by many in the community.

My new Linux personal computer

Sun, 27 Nov 2022 05:56:53 +0000

My computer was showing signs of retirement and old age, so I assembled a new desktop computer for my workstation use. The old one was assembled in 2014. While working on my recent projects, the unbearable sluggishness, made it obvious that I needed an upgrade. Although a bit late now since I purchased and assembled this computer in September, I am going to share my experience with this exercise.

The Search

I researched the components on Reddit and Internet forums. Linux compatibility is a big factor affecting the purchase decision for me since I use only Linux for my work. Most forums and websites target the international computer assembling enthusiast market, gaming and windows users, etc so the information related to Linux art computers was a bit hard to find. People would always suggest the most hyped and top-tier component even when there is no real need. I managed to take time amidst my work and tried to come up with a build spreadsheet.

The forums are filled with western audiences so the parts they would suggest may not be available here in India. It was also a period of global chip shortage and electronic scarcity (which is a bit artificial here I think). I tried to salvage any component from my older computer that I can. My older computer was going to be repurposed for my son’s daily usage. My son’s computer was an older machine which was my second personal computer bought in 2009, it would now go for recycling or donation.

Automatically updating nightly builds of Krita on Linux

Wed, 16 Nov 2022 03:39:23 +0000

When chatting on Krita IRC deevad mentioned that he uses a script to automatically download Krita nightly update and manage the launcher icons etc. So I thought that it is a cool idea to use script to automate the update process. Usually I used to click on the update button and then manually adjust the filename of the Appimage etc. I rename the files of appimage to stable and nightly respectively so that it becomes each to point them to a shortcut and there is no need to change the desktop shortcut file always. I already have two different desktop files to launch the nightly and stable Appimage version of Krita. The update done from the Krita’s welcome screen downloads a file with new file name and we have to either adjust the name in desktop file or rename the downloaded file.

When searching for a solution to automate this I found out about appimageupdatetool I believe this is the same tool that Krita uses in back-end to fetch the update. This tool has a GUI version and also a CLI version. I downloaded the CLI version which is named appimageupdatetool.

wget https://github.com/AppImage/AppImageUpdate/releases/download/continuous/appimageupdatetool-x86_64.AppImage -O ~/.local/bin/appimageupdatetool

The above command downloads the binary file of the tool to my computer’s local/bin folder. Make sure you have ~/.local/bin folder in your $PATH variable. I then mark it as executable with the following command.

Huion H610X Graphic Tablet - review and setup on Linux

Tue, 04 Oct 2022 06:10:45 +0000

Disclaimer: This post is not in any way sponsored by Huion or anyone related to them. All the things stated here are my opinions and your mileage may vary. I do not guarantee it will work for you the same way it worked flawlessly for me.

Recently I have been visiting my village house a lot and I have been trying to set up an alternate workstation there so that I don’t need to carry the laptop and tablet with me all the time. I planned to buy a Wacom but as a backup tablet, it is costly. It costs around ₹28,000 ($345) for a medium-sized Intuos Wacom. So I was searching for an alternative brand. I knew about Huion and XP-pen but the biggest requirement for me is that they should work on Linux without making me climb Everest.

I was happy to see a user of Huion reported that one model (H950p) works nicely with Linux on krita-artists.org. I went to the Huion website and found that there is a slightly newer model of this tablet with a USB-C option. It is the H610X model, this model has all the niceties of H950p plus it also works with android phones and tablets, a good travel companion. What’s more incredible is that this tablet costs 1/7th of the price of a Wacom, This tablet costs around ₹4000 ($50) here.