A Linux distro for digital artists

This distro comes with a long list of pre-installed open source software tools for digital artists.
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Digital art students, professionals, and educators need Linux too. So, I created a new distro, which is derived from Bodhi Linux, a lightweight, Ubuntu-based distro that includes only a browser, a terminal emulator, and a few other system tools.

Bodhi Linux is built on the idea that the user should decide what software should be installed and how the desktop interface should look, a job that Bohdi Linux's Moksha desktop (a fork of the Enlightenment 17 desktop) handles very well. For my new distro, called Bodhi Linux Media, I customized the desktop interface, capitalizing on the fact that the operating system is fast and lean (with no random stuff running in the background) and curating the following list of open source software for artists involved in many different digital art practices (e.g., music, video, graphics, interactive art, coding, etc.).

Adobe alternatives

I chose the following Adobe alternatives based on two requirements: professional-grade features and cross-platform compatibility, to ease the workflow across different professional studios.

  • GIMP: an alternative to Photoshop
  • Inkscape: an alternative to Illustrator
  • Natron: an alternative to After Effects
  • Scribus: an alternative to InDesign
  • Synfig Studio: an alternative to Animate CC

Ardour

Ardour is a professional digital audio workstation, and, unlike many of its closed source competitors, it is cross-platform. It supports LV2 plugins and VST (if you really cannot do without it). Ardour handles both MIDI and audio files and supports JACK audio, which is better than any licensed or closed source audio tools. For example, unlike Rewire, Ardour does not limit you to 64 channels of communication between software.

Arduino IDE

Arduino's microcontrollers are very popular in academia and widely used in interactive, kinetic, and robotic art installations. All Arduino microcontrollers can be coded through the cross-platform Arduino IDE that comes with code examples, a serial monitor, grammar highlighting, and more.

Atom

Atom is a cross-platform text editor—and much more. It can be used as an integrated development environment (IDE) with text prediction, grammar highlighting, and more, and as an online collaborative editor. It supports Git and comes with lots of downloadable packages that add more features. Whether you are a coder or not, Atom is a good tool for messing with text.

Audacity

If you need to do quick work on audio samples, Audacity is the tool you need. You can convert, manipulate, and analyze audio files (even multiple files, if you like) with an easy-to-use but technically detailed and powerful software. It is extendable with many professional plugins.

Blender

Blender is the most well known open source software for 3D animation and rendering, and it is an excellent, professional-grade alternative to closed source software such as 3D Max and Maya. Many people don't realize that Blender is also an impressive video editor that is comparable to Adobe Premiere. Therefore, I didn't add another open source non-linear video editor to Bodhi Linux Media—Blender is all you need.

FireFox

Firefox is a fantastic browser with many extensions options. DuckDuckGo is the default search engine.

Krita

Krita is an awesome painting tool for concept artists, illustrators, matte and texture artists, and the visual effects industry.

LibreOffice

LibreOffice is a commonly used tool for viewing, writing, and editing documents, slides, tables, and more.

MuseScore

MuseScore is music notation software. It supports MusicXML, MIDI, and lots of SoundFonts. Unless you are into graphical scores or other avant-garde music movements, it is hard to imagine what MuseScore cannot do for you. Actually, I am not even sure it couldn't handle some of Berio's transcriptions.

Open Broadcaster Software

Open Broadcaster Software is great for streaming and screencasting.

Processing

Processing is a Java-based programming language primarily for visual artists (but you can do sound, too). Due to its simple grammar, it is the tool of choice for many instructors teaching art through code. However, its simple grammar does not limit users to simple outcomes. To see some of the projects created with Processing, take a look at its exhibition page.

Pure Data

Pure Data (Pd) is one of the oldest and most widely used visual programming languages for multimedia works. Bodhi Linux Media includes Pd Vanilla, which is the base version and the most supported. You can add a wealth of external libraries to it, including the Graphics Environment for Multimedia (GEM), which allows manipulation of images, video, and 3D graphics.

SuperCollider

Over the past decade, live coding, in which artists project or share their computer screen to an audience and code audio and visual digital media—live—has attracted more and more attention. Of the many open source applications that support live coding, I chose SuperCollider for my distro because it is one of the oldest pieces of software that enables live coding (that is, executing live, typed lines of code without interrupting the running audio).

VLC 

VLC is a favorite media player of many open source and traditional computer users.

Installing Bodhi Linux Media

Bodhi Linux Media can be installed on any USB of at least 3GB (the ISO is 2.43GB). It is very simple to install:

  1. Download the image from the distro's GitLab repository.
  2. Download and install Etcher
  3. Follow Etcher's three-step procedure to install the ISO on your USB
  4. Boot your computer from the USB

At the login prompt, enter the credentials:

  • user: digitalart
  • password: digitalart

You can also customize the list of applications by downloading the basic Bodhi Linux and installing select software from the list above using the command lines I used to create Bodhi Linux Media.

Should you have any troubles with or suggestions for the Bodhi Linux Media distro, please contact me through my website or post to any of the various Bodhi forums.

User profile image.
I am an educator, researcher and art practitioner currently working at the University of Limerick (Ireland). You can view my work here: https://giuseppetorre.gitlab.io/

9 Comments

Habatchii says,

Very well... Nice additions to the distro. Wouldn't happen to have a LinuxMint-Cinnamon version?

Hi Peter, very interesting. I have to admit I was not aware of these kind of software..really interesting. Just today Bodhi 5 was released and in a few month I am planning to upgrade Bodhi Media too by adding also game engines such as Godot, OSVR etc. Ren'py would be a great addition indeed as it seems to be used for both visual novels and games. Thanks!

In reply to by peter_cheer

It's a long time I'm looking for a replacement for Corel Draw, I tested every open source tool including many versions of Inkscape, but unfortunately it does not
open well the many gigabytes of .CDR files I've been creating in the past 20 years, even a simple manual two sided sheet with some vector graphics cannot be viewed exactly as it is in Inkscape, even less complex heavy files, still there is a lot of work to do in Inkscape or any other open source graphic tool to be able to handle Corel files without losing any feature of the original CDR file.

Hi!
I installed the ISO on a USB following your instructions.
I tried to boot it but I couldnot.

The USB is not recognized as bootable

I tried in two different computers. .

Thank you

Hi Fran,
it is difficult to know what the problem could be.
Sometimes when creating a boot-able USB many things can go wrong.
Did you check if your USB is correctly formatted? partition tables? boot flags?
In short I do not think the problem is with the distro in but the formatting process of the USB...

I hope you will solve it.

In reply to by Fran (not verified)

Great distro exactly what I needed but when i try to use the method you mentioned to replace windows with it it wont let me create a new partition and none of the other methods are working for me

Hi James, I am glad to hear that you enjoy the distro.
In the article I am only mentioning about Etcher which is a little software that enables you to create a bootable USB...
Are you trying to un-install Windows (hence deleting everything on it, make a backup of the data if not) and install Bodhi Media? If so, Bodhi Media comes with Systemback. You can follow the instructions on how to install it on you hard disk at this link:
https://askubuntu.com/questions/343268/how-to-use-manual-partitioning-d…
I hope this helps. Let me know

In reply to by James Baumli (not verified)

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