You’re a Mean One, Mr. GIMP

In one of my “moving to freedom in stages” projects, I’ve started to use the GIMP on Windows XP. GIMP is the free software counterpart of Adobe Photoshop.

I’ve mentioned previously my bewilderment when faced with its amazing power and feature list. I have to confess that I often just fire up MS Paint or IrfanView for quick image manipulation jobs. That previous post mentions how I found tutorials to do more sophisticated things like changing transparency in .png files and removing red eye, but there are a lot of simple jobs I can do in Paint and IrfanView that would take me a good chunk of time to learn in GIMP, so I’ve been delaying the day of reckoning and just rely on my old crutches to get in and out quick.

Another thing that has slowed adoption is I ran in to a problem with opening new files in GIMP. It would instantly crash, which was disconcerting to have happen on such a routine task. Especially when it still worked when opening old files. It didn’t do this from day one; it was just some bad habit it picked up along the way. I found a thread at the GIMP Talk forum where someone else had this problem, but upgrading from 2.2.12 to 2.2.13 and uninstalling and reinstalling didn’t solve the problem, nor did it help to tweak some of the environment settings as suggested there. I got the idea that it might be related to some of the supporting libraries, but up until today hadn’t dedicated myself to following things through. I could at least do some things in there by opening up existing files.

Finally, today I had some things to do where I really wanted to use the GIMP. The Whos in Whoville wanted to celebrate their Christmas and there would be no more of this Grinchy GIMPy behavior. It took some searching around and luck to finally get it. So, let’s start with a more or less dry recitation of the troubleshooting process and solution, hopefully to be of service to future searchers, and then a few thoughts on the episode from a free software usability and maturity angle.

Helping the GIMP Find the Joy of Christmas

The immediate error seemed to point to a libglib dll, and I got the idea from another GIMP Talk thread that upgrading the Gtk+ library might be something I should try, which brought me to the GTK+ GIMP Toolkit web site. This sounded promising, but was quickly revealed to be a typical heavy-on-the-techie and light-on-the-dummy instructions site. I most often just want to find dummy instructions on getting something to work. I’d love to use the GIMP and not have to worry about a constellation of supporting libraries. The GTK+ for Windows site throws this completely mystifying array of letters and numbers at you, which are the current releases: GLib 2.12.4, Pango 1.14.5, GTK+ 2.8.20. Which brings us to a page with many files, amongst lots of other instructions:

glib-2.12.4.zip. Runtime for GLib 2.12.4. Requires libiconv and gettext.
glib-dev-2.12.4.zip. Corresponding developer package, i.e. headers, import libraries and documentation.
glib-2.12.4.tar.bz2. Corresponding sources.
gtk+-2.8.20.zip. Runtime for GTK+ 2.8.20. Requires GLib 2.12, atk 1.10, Pango 1.12 and cairo 1.2. In addition, if you want to be able to load PNG, JPEG or TIFF images with gdk-pixbuf, you will need libpng and zlib, libjpeg and libtiff respectively.
gtk+-dev-2.8.20.zip. Corresponding developer package.
gtk+-2.8.20.tar.bz2. Corresponding sources.
pango-1.14.5.zip. Pango 1.14.5. Pango is used by GTK+ 2 and GIMP 2. Requires GLib 2.12 and cairo 1.2.
pango-dev-1.14.5.zip. Corresponding developer package.
pango-1.14.5.tar.bz2. Corresponding sources.
atk-1.10.3.zip. Atk is used by GTK+ 2.
atk-dev-1.10.3.zip. Corresponding developer package.
atk-1.10.3.tar.bz2. Corresponding sources.
cairo-1.2.6.zip. Cairo is used by GTK+ 2 and Pango.
cairo-dev-1.2.6.zip. Corresponding developer package.
cairo-1.2.6.tar.gz. Corresponding sources.

Big sigh. Well, glib and gtk+ look promising. Let’s try those. I found that libglib is in a common files folder, so I just unzipped them in to the folder structure, hoping for the best. Yes, I could have read more. It could be my responsibility to actually read and understand all of this. But I don’t want to. I just want to use this program.

Now when I start GIMP, it won’t get anywhere at all. Something about libcairo something-or-other missing. But there’s that cairo zip, so I tried that. Still errors. I ended up unzipping all five zips in to the common GTK folder.

I wasn’t feeling especially optimistic. I was just guessing, after all. My wife was sitting next to me since she had an interest in the project at hand, and I’m sure none of this was increasing her confidence in her husband’s technical abilities or in the free software that I keep singing the praises of.

But, what do you know? Dumping all of those zips willy-nilly in to the C:\Program Files\Common Files\GTK folder took care of the issue. It works now. (Woo hoo!)

Have you noticed that when you finally solve a persistent crashing situation that you continue to flinch internally for a while when you use the now-working feature? Kind of a digital post-traumatic stress disorder.

Aftermath

I’m anticipating objections from people who think I’m being lazy or just stupid. I tend to think defensively. Someone might argue that I’m getting this great software for free. That I should buck up and figure it out. That people shouldn’t expect everything to work so easily. But why not? If you have a graphics program, why shouldn’t it install and just work? Why must everyone be forced to dig around and figure out all kinds of low-level implementation details? I’m imagining a future where we can use our computer tools to really soar and do some amazing things, but not if we all have to spend our time mucking around with libraries every time we want to use some new software. (Or every time some new software breaks some old thing.)

To be fair, most people probably don’t have this problem. I could be taking it personally that it didn’t work for me. And in the end, the answers were out there. It’s good to know that you can eventually solve the problem, but I don’t want to work that hard at this. I have a life that I’m neglecting while I mess around with this stuff. I’m not saying Windows and Windows applications are perfect at handling compatibility and “just working,” but these days with the programs I use, I almost never have to fiddle around like this to use software. If we want people to move to free software, we have to make it easier for the less determined.

After all that, it was a joy to use GIMP for the job I was doing. I was able to muddle my way around and combine images in to larger images in a way that would have been much harder if not impossible with Paint or IrfanView. And I most of all think it’s just so cool that this great program is available for free, as in freedom, even if I had to work a little bit for it.

(Looking back, it quickly starts to fade; all that trouble. In retrospect, it doesn’t feel like it was so bad. But it was a frustration and an annoyance, and felt a lot worse at the time. I can see how people who are expert with GNU/Linux and other free software systems may think the software is easier to use than it is. Same goes for Windows, of course, but you are rarely called on to jump through as many hoops as you routinely go through with configuring free software.)