Antler

Xara Xtreme LX on Ubuntu Dapper · Wednesday August 2, 2006 by Rudolf Vavruch

At last, after almost a year of waiting – and with surprisingly little effort – I have Xara Xtreme running on my Ubuntu Dapper machine.

Vector drawing programs hold a special place in my heart, even though in recent years I have seldom used them.

I cut my teeth on Macromedia Freehand in 1999; I half heartedly fooled around with Adobe Illustrator in 2003, but quickly scuttled back to Freehand.

I have not kept up with recent developments though, at work I have a trusty old version 9 of Freehand that I use about once every four months when I need to do vector work.

Recently I had a good excuse to try out Inkscape on my home Ubuntu box.

I was wary of it at first, concerned it would lack the basic functionality I was used to. However, after a short adjustment period, I found it simpler to use than Freehand.

Don’t get me wrong, Inkscape is missing some of the specialised features that kept me with going back to Freehand for so long, but for straight forward vector drawing I found it a joy to use. I am looking forward to the opportunity to use it again.

So, obviously, ever since Xara announced last year that they were planning to release Xara Xtreme for Linux, I have hungrily been watching their progress. Waiting until the development reached a point where it could be useful.

I have never used Xara Xtreme, but I am easily cajoled into excitement by software hype.

Seriously though, have a look at their gallery and demo movies.

Yes, I am impressed.

Tonight I had the opportunity to do more vector work so I checked out the Xara Xtreme LX site to see how things were coming along and decided that version 0.6 sounded like it was usable enough.

Previous versions had lacked useful features such as saving your work.

I was expecting to have to compile it myself, but they have thoughtfully provided pre-compiled binaries.

I downloaded the stable tar version and followed the dead simple instructions on the the download page (linked above).

At the end of the night I have Xara running happily and painlessly on Ubuntu Dapper, my third blog post and no work done. Suppose I have just given tomorrow a reason for being.