Oct 07 31
Running (Adobe) Lightroom on Linux
As an active Linux user my use of Lightroom was limited to the snatched minutes at Anna's computer for a long time. With the amount of pictures we have and take, the tagging and keywording features were good enough to warrant a purchase even if they were the only feature I used.
After testing Vista for a while on my new laptop and using Lightroom on it I was hooked. So much so, that I put off installing Linux until I could figure out a way to run Lightroom on it. Yes, I endured Vista just so I could use Lightroom.
After a while the hardships of running Vista overcame the lure of Lightroom and I started installing Linux on the laptop. What helped my decision was my experience of running VMware with our development environments. Since I found that the player is free and I can create my own image of XP to run under Linux, my problem was solved.
So no, this post will not show you a method of hacking Wine to get Lightroom running with it (I haven't even tested Lightroom with Wine). What I did was:
- Downloaded and installed the latest version of VMplayer.
- Created an empy VM with EasyVMX. I used a VMplayer 2 compatible VM so that I can share directories between my machine and the image without the need for Samba.
- Install XP (including various applications) in the empty virtual machine.
- Tweaked and fiddled with the shared directories.
- Ran Lightroom ;)
When I ran Lightroom in Vista, I used it to import the pictures from the memory card when I hooked it up. With the VM setup I don't give the VM access to the memory card reader (I really don't know why), so I copy the files manually and use rename to keep them in numeric order and lowercase the letters. My scheme for directories and such is simple: all pictures from a given day are copied into a date folder (e.g. 20071031). Each image is then renamed to represent the (almost) true shot number with the camera and camera specific identifier. (Our 300D's images are img_ and the 30D's are Vimg_ .)
The directory in which the pictures are copied is in a folder that I share with Lightroom, so now all I have to do is import them (with the setting that doesn't move or copy the images) in and I'm all set to go.
One issue that I have noticed with running VMs in either Linux or Windows (XP, at work) is that on laptops it really increases the speed of the VM if it is on a separate drive, e.g. an external USB-drive.
