Picasa for Linux available!

[Nick Law]

Having looked at both the linux version and the windows version running 
on 0.9.14 I must admit that I prefer the windows version running on 
0.9.14 simply because the fonts look much better on my system  ( if 
anybody is interested I can send a couple of screen shots), i.e the font 
look more like you typical windows type font.

One thing I forget to mention and I don't know if it makes any 
difference, but I'm running Picasa for Windows on a patched version of 
0.9.14. The patch in question is the memory patch used to make World of 
Warcraft work. http://appdb.winehq.org/appview.php?versionId=4031

Regards
Nick

Nick Law wrote:
> I 've loaded and installed the .bin version, installation went 
> flawlessly,  I told it to index the whole hard drive it started doing 
> that then after 30 seconds or do a message box poped up  --- FATAL 
> ERROR -- "Picasa cannot continue", it completely hung, the OK button 
> was unresponsive and I had to kill it in a unix window. Whether this 
> had anything to do with it but as it was indexing I changed my mind 
> and told it to index the hard disk only once rather than keep an eye 
> out for changes.
>
> The windows version indexed the hard drive with no errors, although I 
> didn't change anything while it it scanning the disk.
>
> Regards
> Nick
>
> Nick Law wrote:
>> Another quick note.... just saw the mistake I made with the URL, so 
>> here it is again ...
>>
>> This URL will display the pages in English but will not allow the 
>> download to take place ... so read about it here ....
>> http://www.freeproxy.us/index.php?q=aHR0cDovL3BpY2FzYS5nb29nbGUuY29tL2xpbnV4L2luZGV4Lmh0bWw%3D 
>>
>>
>> then click on this link to download the same thing in French but this 
>> URL will allow the download ..
>> http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fpicasa.google.com%2Flinux%2F&langpair=en%7Cfr&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&prev=%2Flanguage_tools 
>>
>>
>> Nick Law wrote:
>>> Thanks Dan, impressive program. That link seems to be down though, 
>>> as of 26/May/06 11:00GMT, however I downloaded and installed the 
>>> latest version of Picasa for windows and ran it on wine 0.9.14 and 
>>> it seems to run very well, there is a few fixme's but so far 
>>> everything seems to work although I haven't by any means used all 
>>> it's features (there's a lot of them).
>>>
>>> On the google picasa group, 
>>> http://groups.google.com/group/Google-Labs-Picasa-for-Linux?lnk=srg 
>>> there is also some mention of the link being down but only for 
>>> outside the US, so here's a backdoor if the link doesn't work for 
>>> you and your not in the US. 
>>> http://groups.google.com/group/Google-Labs-Picasa-for-Linux?lnk=srg 
>>> (It's a bit slow but seemed to work, just give it time)
>>>
>>> Nick
>>>
>>>
>>> Dan Kegel wrote:
>>>> Google has indeed been working on Picasa, and it's finally 
>>>> available for
>>>> download at
>>>>  http://labs.google.com/
>>>>
>>>> For the curious, here are a few tidbits about how it came to be.
>>>>
>>>> When Google wanted to port Picasa to Linux, they faced a
>>>> problem: the Picasa team was busy working on new projects, and
>>>> having them also do a native port would have taken a while.
>>>> As an experiment, Google decided to give Wine a try.
>>>> A quick look showed that much of Picasa already worked,
>>>> but key features were missing: the IWebBrowser API, SSL,
>>>> scanner/camera support, removable media notification (so you can
>>>> insert a flash drive and have Windows notice it right away),
>>>> and change notification (so Windows can notify apps when new
>>>> files are created), among others.   Fortunately, Wine was
>>>> already halfway to having an implementation of IWebBrowser
>>>> thanks to Jacek Caban's Summer of Code 2005 project.  And all
>>>> that other stuff couldn't be *that* hard, right? :-)  So
>>>> Google engaged Codeweavers to add those features and fix any
>>>> other bugs.  This resulted in tons of improvements to Wine (see
>>>> the list at code.google.com/wine.html), all of which are now in
>>>> the public tree at winehq.org.
>>>>
>>>> Many people assume that when porting a Windows app to Linux
>>>> using Wine, the best thing to do is link Winelib into the
>>>> application to create a native Linux application.  Not so!
>>>> It's just as effective, and a heck of a lot easier, to run
>>>> the same binary on both Windows and Wine.  So that's what the
>>>> Picasa team did.  Picasa for Linux uses slightly different
>>>> text messages, but the .exe file is identical for both Windows
>>>> and Linux.
>>>>
>>>> Toward the very end, everything was looking great except
>>>> that the initial assumption that most cameras emulate storage
>>>> devices turned out to be wrong.  Fortunately, Marcus Meissner
>>>> just happened to decide to implement libgphoto support; his
>>>> patch appeared at the perfect moment, and now Picasa supports
>>>> both common flavors of cameras.
>>>>
>>>> Two features left out of the Linux version were CD-ROM
>>>> burning (the driver Picasa uses is hard to support under Wine)
>>>> and movie playback (Wine doesn't have the necessary codecs).
>>>> Both are potentially fixable in a future version, but were
>>>> beyond the scope of this first port.
>>>>
>>>> One interesting challenge when shipping commercial apps for
>>>> Linux is packaging -- do you choose RPM or Debian packages,
>>>> or do you use a WIndows-style installer?  The Picasa for
>>>> Linux team chose all three, in hopes of pleasing everybody.
>>>> (Let's see how well *that* works :-)  The Windows-style
>>>> installer was implemented using the open-source Loki installer,
>>>> and a few patches were contributed back for that, too.
>>>>
>>>> The Picasa for Linux team had a blast.  It's not often you
>>>> get to pour resources into a vital open source project to help
>>>> ship a commercial application!  We hope we get to do it again
>>>> sometime soon, and we hope the results are good enough to
>>>> encourage other companies to give Wine a try.
>>>>
>>>> Thanks to the Wine community for a very capable platform!
>>>> - Dan
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>
>>>
>>
>>
>>
>
>
>