Picasa for Linux available!

Nick Law nlaw at mic-nucmed.co.uk
Fri May 26 06:19:34 CDT 2006


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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