Progress with darktable

I’ve been growing more and more annoyed that I have to fire up a VirtualBox to do my RAW photo processing. I’ve got nothing against VirtualBox – it’s a fantastic application for virtualisation. I just don’t want to boot up MS Windows XP and run Adobe Lightroom to do so.

I’ve been watching developments in the Open Source photoprocessing application space for a while now, and recently (since I found a gcc 4.6.0 in pkg(5) format via http://staticdev.uk.openindiana.org:10002) I decided to give Darktable a whirl.

I had to rebuild a few of the dependencies, since the WOS versions were built with the Studio C++ compiler, and there’s no way g++ libraries will talk to Studio C++ applications. That cost me a few days (and nights), but I’ve now got a working installation of Darktable built from the git repo:

this is darktable 0.8+668~gec9a548
copyright (c) 2009-2011 johannes hanika
hanatos@gmail.com

And now, the obligatory screenshot (3200×1200):

screenshot of darktable on Solaris 11 Express

I need to tidy up the changes I made and contribute them upstream – for darktable and its dependencies. I also want to contribute pkg(5) manifests so anybody else who wants to can build it for Solaris 11 Express as well. I think there are a few areas I can contribute to the project, and it’s definitely worth my while to do so.

I think the cord is almost cut now. What a fantastic day this is!