The third version of the Oyranos Colour Management LiveCD is based on openSUSE-12.1 and will run on x86_64 compatible PC´s. I placed the ISO image yesterday after some preparations on the better accessible SourceForge site for download. The CD project starts into a instantly colour managed desktop, which is unique under Linux.

The ICC desktop colour correction is done by the CompICC colour server. The LiveCD contains the usual mixture of colour managed graphics applications. Among them is the colour management system Oyranos, the KDE Color Management panel, a profiler based on Argyll CMS and many colour management aware applications for drawing, colour analysis and desktop publishing. Due to package size changes not even all programs from the last release are covered. I am very sorry for that. Nevertheless I decided to include Firefox, as a very wide spread every days application. After fixing a bug in Firefox, the web browser is usable under CompICC and has generally improved regarding colour management. But still it has many colour management related issues.

The desktop widget contains some test images to help you verifying, your desktop is setup correctly and works inside all colour managed applications. Covered are some JPEG, PNG, TIFF and SVG images with wide gamut and swapped channel test profiles. You will surely spot problems, as not everything in Linux desktops is really polished regarding colour management. But these test data can help you in getting a sense of, what can be relied on and what not. You can easily include other applications into your test by installing from openSUSE. And please help the projects and report bugs to the according project bug trackers. This will show interest in the issues seen with colour management and helps developers spot current weaknesses, which are otherwise overseen.

The CD uses the stable version of the Compiz compositing window manager, which is the only one being able to run under KDE. While the Oyranos CMS is packaged in openSUSE, a full screen desktop colour correction is currently not possible with KDE´s KWin or any window manager other than Compiz with the CompICC plugin. One difference to the previous LiveCD is a better useable nouveau driver, which since greatly improved and can now launch into Compiz with GPU acceleration.