I've been using darktable mostly for it's live view overlay abilities to help
me shoot composite shots for commercial clients. I recently discovered that my
little netbook I got about 2 years ago could actually support a 64 bit OS. I
was a bit surprised... so I decided to get under the hood and see if I could
tweek the current setup to run darktable reliably enough to use it in the
field... I had it loaded in the past, but it was a 32 bit Ubuntu 10.4 install
using Unity desktop. I decided that had to change, Ubuntu + Unity = bloated for
a netbook. The performance of darktable on that system was... barely usable. I
could get live view working, but the whole setup just struggled and felt
sluggish.
Hardware:
Asus EEE PC 1015PE - 5400 RPM hard drive, 1 GB RAM, Intel Atom Dual Core CPU
N450 1.66GHz, N10 Family Integrated Graphics Controller
As you can see, it's fairly humble, only cost me about $250 when I got it new
at best buy.
Install:
Linux Mint 14 64 bit - fully updated. I'm using the LXDE desktop environment to
cut down on resources being used. I was mindful of the RAM situation, so I
created a 20 GB swap space. Kinda extreme, but I wanted to cover all the bases.
Darktable was manually compiled and installed using the GIT source. It's
Verdict:
It works - fantastically! I was really shocked at how much more usable it is.
It loads in just a few seconds. The tethering works totally smooth, no glitches
getting in the way. It captures fine. Even editing is possible with the more
intense modules, you do have to wait a few seconds for things to really take
effect, but it isn't crashing or freezing up. My main purpose is capture / live
view, so it's working great.
I'm a bit tempted to upgrade the system to a SSD with 2 GB RAM, but I don't
think it would be very useful, I'm never going to do any serious editing on a
netbook, but live view / capture in the field is very much on my plate of
things I need to do and so far this is working out for me.
Chris Nuzzacowww.chrisnuzzaco.com
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