Picasa for Linux available!
Nick Law
nlaw at mic-nucmed.co.uk
Fri May 26 07:27:40 CDT 2006
I spoke to soon, they seems to be a couple of show stoppers on the
windows on wine 0.9.14 and on the linux versions, i.e. hangs or not
wanting to run at all.
Can somebody let me know where I should report these problems to ? I
assume this this not the correct place..
Nick
Nick Law wrote:
> And here's a working english link for those outside the US, I wonder
> why the normal links don't work for those outside the US ?
> http://picasa.google.com.nyud.net:8080/linux/thanks-other.html It
> takes you straight to the .bin download with it's selfextracting
> installer.
>
> Nick Law wrote:
>> 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
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
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