It was our Great Aunt’s funeral earlier this month. I won’t lie – it wasn’t an easy time, but I console myself that she had reached the grand old age of 93, and had led a good life. As evidenced by the turn out.
I bumped into distant relatives that I hadn’t seen before, and some that I hadn’t seen since Christmas. After the service we went to what I suppose could be called a wake. It was held at a hotel – the family had hired out a room, and me and Dave were talking to our cousin. Now – I won’t name names here, as I don’t have her permission, but we started talking about what she was up to.
She is an avid cross stitcher, and was showing us some photos on her phone of some of her pieces. Now – a phone screen can’t do justice to the effort and quality that goes into these cross stitches, but it got me thinking :
“Surely there’s some software that can do this”
and by jingo there is.
KXstitch is a software package that creates cross stitch patterns from images. This post details how to install KXStitch from source, on a vanilla Ubuntu installation… “But Mike…” I can hear you all asking “Surely it’s available in the repository” – well no. The author of this application is currently working ona new KDE4 version. “Ahhh – but isn’t it a snap to compile this code anyway”?
well – no. See Ubuntu now ships with the Unity desktop environment, meaning that you need to install a ton of supporting KDE libraries to enable the compilation of applications dependant upon KDE architecture. Prepare yourselves – this is going to require some downloads so not the sort of this to try over a slow or 3G connection – but here goes.
- Get the Source
cd ~
sudo apt-get install git git clone git://kxstitch.git.sourceforge.net/gitroot/kxstitch/kxstitch
- Get the pre-requisites
sudo apt-get install kdelibs5-dev sudo apt-get install cmake sudo apt-get install libmagick++-dev
-
Build it cd ~/kxstitch sudo ./build.sh
-
Run it kxstitch
-
Profit
Some screen shots of the application in action
Cross Stitch of Frankenstein