addition to the menu. As an alternative you could just start it from a

terminal window. Just type 'photopaint'.

I tested Corel Photo-Paint 9 for Linux on a machine having with a Celeron

550, 64MB of RAM and a Matrox Millennium G200 AGP Graphics Card with 8 Mb

of Video Ram. The distribution used was Red Hat Linux 6.2 running the KDE

desktop environment. Corel Photo-Paint started up quite quickly on this

machine.

What will surprise you is the look and feel of this Linux port. It is

exactly like Corel Photo-Paint for Windows 95/98. The user interface

looks exactly like the Windows version. Everything you see in the Windows

version is available here. All the functions, tools, filters, effects.

The reason for this is that Corel used the Wine libraries to speed up

development of the Linux version. This is not a native Linux port. This

approach does speed up development but the downside is the performance.

The menus open a annoying fraction of a second later and scrolling

through the file listing in the browser is jerky and slow. Also every time

I dragged a window across the Corel desktop, CPU usage would shoot up to

the nineties. This behavior is very annoying as most of the time you're

waiting for the program to transfer control back to you.

But for these user interface issues, I couldn't make out any difference. I

could have been working with the Windows version.

Let's check out what Photo-Paint has in store for you. It has an effective

colour management facility for the optimization of graphic images. The

user can also create movies on Corel Photo-Paint 9 by creating the

individual frames and then putting them into a sequence.

Working on layers is a possibility on Corel Photo-Paint 9 which enables

the user to make minute changes, select certain areas of images for

editing and also the import and placement of other images on that image.

The default file extension of the file saved by Corel Photo-Paint 9 is

.cpt, but, the user can export as well and import images in the following

formats.

BMP - Windows bitmap

TIFF Bitmap

GIF - Compuserve Bitmap/Graphic Interchange Format

JPEG Bitmap for web and screen use

PSD - Adobe Photoshop Image

PNG - Portable Network Graphics (a new format used for the web)

I found the performance quite satisfactory, but I strongly recommend a

machine with 128 MB of RAM for smoother performance. Photo-Paint does