[ptx] hugin and enblend?

[Rob Park]

Hello everybody, I am new to this list, and fairly new to panorama 
stitching in general.

I use linux, and so far I've been somewhat frustrated with the state of 
panorama-creation tools on linux. It seems that every website I find 
that has information is at least 2 years out of date (pages that are 
marked with a 'last updated' tag in the footer invariably have dates 
from 2001 to 2003). Especially that Helmut Dersch guy, did he fall of 
the face of the earth in 2001 or what?

Anyway, I've been using hugin with mixed results. It seems that hugin is 
very good at lining up the images, correcting for lens distortion, etc, 
but I very often get really ugly stitch lines. I know that I can correct 
the stitch lines myself in the Gimp, as I am accustomed to using the 
Pandora tool (which is essentially hand-hacking the panorama together 
yourself, manually), but I have a painful time importing hugin panoramas 
into the gimp, as tif2xcf doesn't work with gimp 2.0 (maybe I'm doing 
something wrong?).

Then I found out about enblend, and tried it, but I just don't see any 
difference between what enblend produces and what hugin produces as 
output. They are almost identical! Am I missing something here? Are 
there any good tutorials on how to properly use these tools?

Also, is there a good place to go to get the latest version of all this 
software? (hugin, enblend, autopano, panotools, etc). Like I said, all 
the websites are out of date, so I'm not sure if I'm using the latest 
versions or not.

Thank you.