The "GNU Image Manipulation Program" (originally the General Image Manipulation Program) sired by Spencer Kimball & Peter Mattis. In their own words, "GIMP is our answer to the current lack of free (or at least reasonably priced) image manipulation software for Linux and UNIX in general." It is a raster editor, which means that it performs operations directly on the pixels that make up the image, and not a vector editor.

Not really. It doesn't use the GNOME application framework. The only thing it has in common is GTK+. GIMP can optionally use gnome-vfs, allowing you to load and edit images from remote servers.

GTK was developed solely for GIMP, initially. Towards the end of the 0.99 development cycle in 1998, GTK was split from being bundled with GIMP to being a separately available library. See ancient history for some interesting tidbits from the GIMP perspective.

Yes. You can run xscanimage, the front end to SANE (Scanner Access Now Easy), either as a GIMP extension or in stand-alone mode. This supports Mustek and HP flatbed scanners, as well as the Connectix color QuickCam camera.

Yes. In either the system-wide gimprc file or your personal gimprc file, uncomment the line that includes install-colormap. If GIMP gives you a message similar to either of these when you try to start it: Xlib: extension "MIT-SHM" missing on display "198.51.29.58:0.0". or * WARNING **: XShmAttach failed! then you need to run it with the --no-xshm option. This happens for one of two reasons.

Any system capable of running Gnome 2, KDE 3.2, Windows 2000, Mac OS X and later versions should be able to run GIMP. GIMP's biggest appetite is for memory and how much you will need will depend on the how many images you are working with, their resolution, size, the number of layers you use and so on. As a general rule, more is better, but 128MB should be enough to be getting started with.

Use the elliptical select tool, hold down SHIFT key to constrain as circle, fill the selected area with new color, right click on selected area, choose SELECT, SHRINK, shrink selection by whatever number of pixels you want your circle width to be, right click again in selected area, choose EDIT, CUT. Voila, one beautifully antialased circle.

You need to copy the gtkrc file that comes with the GIMP source (in the top level directory) into $HOME/.gimp/gtkrc . As of 0.99.10, this should be recognized.

Some broken application placed a file named intl.dll to your Windows or Windows\System32 directory. Rename it, and GIMP will work fine.

Minimize the window and ignore it, as most of the warnings it displays are harmless, and GIMP will still work. This is usually caused by broken programs installing libraries to Windows\System32 directory. Most likely there's a bad version of intl.dll, libxml2.dll, xmlparse.dll or xmltok.dll in there. Rename or remove it, and GIMP should load fine.