If you have never used Gimp I recommend first looking at the tutorial at http://adrian.gimp.org/gimppipe/.

Usage

First create a new image with one layer (grayscale or transparent RGB, depends) and draw/copy your brush. Keep in mind that the center of your image will later be the center of the rotation. Eventually you have to move the brush layer to archieve this.

Next start the script which can be found in Script-Fu/Layers/Multi rotation if it is properly installed (see below). Now select what the maximum rotation angle should be. I suggest 360 degree for rotating things and 180 or 90 degree if your brush has higher symmetry. Just play around with the settings.

After this you might want to resize the image because the canvas has been enlarged in order to fit the rotated layers.

Finally save your brush as a Gimp animated brush *.gih in you Gimp brush folder.

When I created this script I didn’t know that was already another one created by Rob Antonishen which more or less does the same. It can be found at http://ffaat.pointclark.net/.

Installation

Just download the script below and copy it to your Gimp script folder. On Linux/Unix systems this usually is:

~/.gimp-2.4/scripts

and on Windows systems it should be somewhere in

C:\Documents and Settings\Your User\gimp-2.4\scripts

Can’t remember the exact location. It has been a while since I have used Gimp on Windows…

Download

• multirotate.scm (22 B, Gimp 2.4, GPL)
  

Known Bugs

After the script created the new layers you need to select/click a different layer in order to update the Gimp image window.

By the way, this is my first Scheme script. So I’m glad that it works (for me) at all.

Features

• Raise/Lower Volume
• Mute/Unmute
• Displays the current volume on-screen using osd_cat

Usage

Open the script file with your favourite editor edit following to lines to fit your needs:

CONTROL="Front" CHANNEL="Front Left"

CONTROL is used to set the volume and CHANNEL to get the current volume. Run amixer to see which is the right control and amixer get YOUR-CONTROL to select one channel listed there.

As I am using the compiz-fusion window manager along with the XFCE desktop I decided to use the built-in functions of compiz to bind the keys.

In the CompizConfig Settings Manager select the General Options sub-dialog. Inside the Commands tab find three empty slots and bind them to:

PATH-TO-THE-SCRIPT/avolctrl.sh down PATH-TO-THE-SCRIPT/avolctrl.sh up PATH-TO-THE-SCRIPT/avolctrl.sh toggle

Finally bind those command slots to your multimedia keys. For me these were:

XF86AudioLowerVolume XF86AudioRaiseVolume XF86AudioMute

Prerequisites

• amixer: In Ubuntu you need to install the alsa-utils package.
• osd_cat: In Ubuntu you need to install the xosd-bin package. Source code can be downloaded from http://www.ignavus.net/software.html.

For a different Linux distribution you need to find the appropriate packages your self or compile the binaries from the source code.

Download

• avolctrl.sh (2 KiB, GPL)

Troubleshooting

In case the keys don’t work, check if your keyboard sends events to the xserver using xev. Additionally you might have to define the keys properly using xmodmap if it does not work out-of-the-box. Following codes are working for me (Microsoft Comfort Curve Keyboard)

keycode 160 = XF86AudioMute keycode 174 = XF86AudioLowerVolume keycode 176 = XF86AudioRaiseVolume

Known Bugs

• No bugs known yet. As I said, very quick’n'dirty hack but should work anyway.