Alternative for ASP on Linux: running Lightroom with WINE

[madsec]

Hello fellow sufferers!

First of all: I love ASP and I really would like to use it further in the future!

But: Since I am planing to buy a Fuji X-E1 with X-Trans-Sensor in the near future, and I am also not very convinced that this sensor will ever be supported by ASP, I was looking for an alternative RAW-developer for Linux. Darktable is fine and my be really good in the future, but for now it's no real alternative for me.
So I looked for a solution to somehow run Adobe Lightroom in Linux. At first I tried a virtual machine of Win7 with VMware Player, that was fine but in some points quite slow, especially when rendering previews. Also after half an our messing around with different Windows versions and license keys, having one of the university and a private one for an upgrade version, I was greatly annoyed and remembered why I never wanted to use that OS any more
Then I looked for a working solution running LR with WINE, wineHQ says it's not working, but I found a forum in which people were solving lots of problems. So I tried it with the newest LR4.4 Demo and, after some fiddling with 32bit libraries on my 64bit Debian system, it's finally working for me! Here is the link to the instructions: http://www.pentaxforums.com/forums/digi ... ost2171005

It wasn't exactly easy to get it running, but it's working fine now and is unexpectedly fast too! For now I will work with both ASP and LR parallel as long as possible, observing the stability of LR and so on. But at the moment I think it can be a real alternative under Linux and if more people would be using it, maybe there could be some progress on the WINE or Adobe side as well.

I will later write my problems and solutions I experienced at the installation in the linked forum thread. But you can ask me questions here as well, although I am just the user of the great work of those other guys!

[madsec]

Posted my comments on the installation instructions in the thread linked above in the starting post. Direct link, doesn't help without the original instructions though : http://www.pentaxforums.com/forums/digi ... ost2345226

[tchetche]

Wow, I've discovered a very very interesting post, here!

As I am in the same situation as you (no way to switch back to win$$), I'll seriously give a try to that solution.

Are you using Debian Stable or Testing branch?

[madsec]

Nice to hear, that my post just helped someone And I just discovered, that the author of the patches tried the method with the new LR5 beta version and it worked as well. See this link here, there is another patch to get this work:
http://www.pentaxforums.com/forums/digi ... ost2355090

The system I'm using is Linux Mint Debian Edition, which is basicly a Debian Testing with Cinnamon Desktop, which itself is a fork of Gnome 3. If you have further questions about the installation process you can ask me here, or for deeper questions maybe it's better to discuss them in the Pentax Forum thread, since the author of the patches is watching that thread.

[jakkul]

Hi!

I'm running both LR 4.4 beta under wine and under virtualbox on windows 8. I think that the responsiveness and general usability is a tad better under virtualbox. One can use the seamless desktop integration mode, so LR from virtualbox becomes one of your apps under linux.

I'm using ubuntu 12.10 with gnome-fallback mode desktop. Color managed.

I'm holding my thumbs for a native version thou...

[madsec]

Thanks for your post. What processor and amount of memory do you have? In my case the Wine version is far better in the matter of speed and response, also the it worked better in VMware Player than VirtualBox for me. Only the export of images takes a very long time in Wine and there are some graphical glitches.

To be honest, it doesn't really make fun in my case to use any of the mentioned methods, it just doesn't feel good to use LR that way. A RAW developer should work without any disturbances, that one can just concentrate on the image. Maybe on a faster machine LR in a virtual machine would run better, if you already have a working windows license.

I don't think that there will ever be a native Linux version of Adobe Photoshop or Lightroom, or any other of the big players in RAW development. The Linux market is very small and the portation of the code would take a lot of resources. That they have a Mac version is not a very strong argument, because graphical enviroments of Mac and Linux are very different, only the base is where the systems are similar.