Photo Artists Workshop For Linux

Photo Artists Workshop (also known as P.A.W. among connoisseurs) is a free distribution of Linux based on the minimalist Puppy Linux operating system and targeted towards photo artists who want to create digital images with open source software.

This Puppy Linux derivative is distributed as a dual-arch Live CD, only in the sense that it is bootable on computers supporting either of the 32-bit (x86) or 64-bit (x86_64) instruction set architectures. The default username is “puppy” and the default password is “linux” (without quotes).

At a first glance, the Live CD boot menu looks complex, but newbies shouldn't worry at all because the ISO image will automatically boot the live system in five seconds from the moment the user boots it from the BIOS of a computer using either a CD disc or a USB flash drive.

Being based on Puppy Linux, the distribution uses JWM (Joe’s Window Manager) as its default and only desktop environment, comprised of Xcompmgr, rounded corners, as well as fading and transparency effects. Keep in mind though, that you are required to choose a display server before entering the graphical session.

Despite the fact that it is designed to be as minimal as possible, the distro comes pre-loaded with a wide range of useful tools for photo artists, including the Blender 3D modeller, GIMP image editor, Phatch batch image editor, Fotoxx image editor, XPaint and mtPaint graphics editor, RawStudio RAW image editor, Inkscape vector graphics editor and Wings3D polygon modeler.

The Bluefish, Scribus, Wine, Mozilla Firefox, Gxine, Mplayer, PupTV, Conky, Pwidgets, PuppyBasic screensaver, Xscreensaver, Gslapt package manager, CPU Scaler, Streamtuner and Pmusic applications are also installed.