K10D PEF files under Linux. All Ahead Full!

Mongoose · 2007-03-26T00:40:40+0100

I don't know if anyone else is interested, but I have just finished setting up my system to process PEF RAW files under Linux. I'm slowly weaning myself off Windows since I have made the decision that I will not purchase Vista. In related news Windows is now officially my secondary operating system. I can now do anything which I do regularly as well or better penguin powered than under Windows. It was actually remarkably easy, all the files I used had pretty good walkthrough installs provided you are tech-savvy enough to avoid panic at the first sight of a command line. I'm using Ubuntu Linux, and since I have not been able to find a thumbnail display program which works well and does what I want it to (ie, display the thumbnails and nothing else!), I am using DCRAW to extract the embedded JPGs from the PEF files. I have writen what is quite possibly the worlds shortest useful bash script to do this for me and place them in a directory called "thumbs". I flick through these and decide which ones I want to edit, then use GIMP with the UFRAW plugin to open the RAW files for editing, do what I feel I need to do and save as .xcf or JPG or whatever else seems a good idea at the time. UFRAW's controls are perhaps not the best, but they are functional and seem to produce good output. If you don't like them and feel like shelling out some cash then Bibble is also quite happy with K10D PEF files and is penguin friendly. I might well buy bibble in the long run, but for now I'm making do with the freebies. If only there were a Silkypix for Linux I would be sorely tempted. The packages in Ubuntu's package manager are too out of date to read K10D PEF's, so I had to build UFRAW and DCRAW from source. This also entailed some swearing and cursing because of unfilled dependencies and missing compilers, but the help files were fairly specific about what needed to be present before the install would work.

Pentax Digital SLRsPentax Digital SLRs

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Ammonyte Ammonyte

1221 posts
21 years
Buckinghamshire

Posted 03/04/2007 - 12:46 Link

Macs and Linux boxes are not immune from viruses and other nasties, it's just that there are currently fewer of them around. As Linux use expands expect to see more viruses written for them.

http://hackers-news.blogspot.com/2006/04/linux-mac-viruses-on-rise.html

Tim the Ammonyte
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K10D & sundry toys
http://www.ammonyte.com/photos.html