I just tried the Photoshop thing and it didn't really merge anything very well. So I went back to photostitch and merged 20 pictures. It did a great job, but still the file was only 10megs and I want to print really big pictures. Hmmmm. Does Aperture do anything?

The simple answer is install wine then run autostitch. how easy it would be to install wine, i don't know. how to tell wine you want to run autostitch I don't know either, but I'd guess it would go something like this:

If wine is windows work alike, then there would be an equivalent to windows explorer, which is a listing of the files on the hard drive. You'd navigate to the folder where you unzipped autostitch and double click on autostitch.exe. A small window comes up with a very simple menu. Click on file, select open and browse to the folder where you have the images you want to stitch. Select the ones you want to stitch (I usually have to use some kind of image viewer to identify out which ones they are, since autostich isn't going to show you the image, just the file names.) The first time you run it, it will automatically grab them and stitch them at the default setting, something like 1400 pixels wide. This will give you an idea of what the result will be. Then you go to the edit on the autostich menu and select the options you want, click ok, then use the stitch item on the menu to stitch with the new options. It will remember which files you want included. If there is a pretty good match, it will go like a breeze.

I don't go to 100% until the very small version looks pretty good. The thing does want a lot of memory when you go bigger, and can be slow. When I had only 1GB and a slower machine, the pond image took nearly a half hour. Even with 4GB and a much faster machine, it still took close on to 20 minutes. But it worked, while photoshop, though quicker, didn't.