Corel Photo-Paint needs no introduction. Photo-Paint has been competing

with Adobe Photoshop for some time now. While Photo-Paint has always been

a very capable program, but, it hasn't quite been able to match the

popularity of Photoshop. Its image creation and manipulation features are

very strong. So it was good news when Corel decided to the latest release,

Photo-Paint 9, to the Linux community as a free download.

Corel Photo-Paint for Linux can be downloaded here. Both RPM and DEB

packages are available. It's a huge 96 MB download which took over 8 hours

on my 56k modem. Since I was using Red Hat, I downloaded the Red Hat

RPM's. What you actually download is a tar.gz file which contains all the

necessary files in RPM format and not one large RPM.

Installation was fairly easy. First you need to untar the tar.gz

file. /tmp is a good location. It is better if you make a new

sub-directory and then untar there because there's are some 50+ files in

here.

cd /tmp

mkdir corel

Now it's time to untar the file here. The file would be named

CorelPHOTOPAINT9LnxRPM.tar.gz. Untarr'ing is a simple command. First

changes into the newly created directory and run the following command.

cd corel

tar zxvf CorelPHOTOPAINT9LnxRPM.tar.gz

This will create the proper directories and extract the files there. You

might want to read ReadmeFirst.html for more information.

Corel has provided a simple install script. You can also install it

manually as given in the Readme but the script is much faster and

easier. You will need to run the script from X though. If X was not

already running then start X and open a terminal window. Then change into

the directory where you untarred Linux and run the install script there.

cd /tmp/corel

./install

The install script will prompt you for the root password at this

point. Enter that and installation will begin.

Then the installation will prompt you for the Linux distribution that

you're running. The installation detected the distribution automatically

every time I tried it and worked across Red Hat, SuSE and Corel. The next

few screens you can just click through. There's just a license agreement

and a note informing you of the installation location.

After the installation is complete, a launcher will be created in the KDE

menu. You will have to restart the panel or login again to see the