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Google Releases Picasa for Linux
chrisd writes "Hi, everyone. Today I'm pleased to announce that we're making Picasa, our photo management application, available for Linux. This is a pre-beta labs release and since we're still learning on how to best make software for Linux, we're asking that you submit your bugs as you find them. Picasa for Linux uses Wine internally; this shows a bit in the interface, but it works even better than we had hoped. Download it and check it out! A list of supported distributions can be found in the FAQ. We hope our patches to Wine will help make it easier for everyone to run Windows apps on Linux and other Unix-like systems. Thanks to our pals at CodeWeavers who did much of the heavy lifting, and to Marcus Meissner, whose libgphoto support patch was a welcome surprise."
Not to be one to spread rumours, but ...
Google recently turned up at Oxford University to tell us all about job prospects with them. There was a Question and Answer session at the end, and the chap from their Mobile department was asked whether Google Earth was coming to Linux anytime soon. He said he knew the answer, but wasn't going to tell us.
Read into it what you will.
I though Picasa was written in QT... so porting it to linux it was supposed to be an easy task.
I expected more than just a WineLib port, though. Hopes were high that they would use one of the de-facto standard widget toolkits for Linux, GTK+ or Qt... ah, well. At least it works.
Do you people honestly think that any Google software will be released as open source? Even their Firefox extensions aren't open source! They're relatively good about contributing back to existing open source projects, but I don't know of a single novel application they've written and then released as OSS. If you're not going to use any non-open software, don't download stuff from Google.
Presumably, he wrote a patch that integrates libgphoto with Wine, thus enabling Picassa to download photos from digital cameras - a neccessary feature that would not have otherwise been available as part of the Wine API.
Are you sure? All the digital cameras I've ever used have been USB Storage devices - so, presuming your Linux distribution is friendly about autodetecting and automounting, downloading photos from cameras can be no more esoteric than reading a file off your hard drive.
Why is Google all of a sudden releasing programs for desktops? Despite MS attitude towards them, Google actually seems to promote the 'Windows World View' of all things computing.
Even the Linux-platform releases (like this one) use Windows concepts, architecture, standards etc. So long as Linux emulates Windows, its never gonna attain superiority as a better platform.
Is it Googles intention to establish that Windows is indeed the better option for the computing world?
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If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
Google did this kind of thing when they launched Google Video too. Does anyone know why it excludes the rest of the world when launching new sites? It's the only company I personally know that has web pages that only work in certain countries.
Not so. A minority (Sonys, mostly) are USB-storage, the rest are mostly PTP, which requires an app like gphoto2 to extract your pictures from the camera. Having had one of each type, my opinion is that USB-storage is good and PTP sucks dead donkeys through a straw. (It is not just gphoto2 either: dealing with a full PTP camera from WinXP was painful the one time I tried.) However one rarely chooses a digital camera based on whether it is PTP or USB-storage.
it's quite interestinga y/047806.html
http://www.winehq.com/pipermail/wine-devel/2006-M
From your comments I would venture you have not. It is extremely well-polished and as stable as the Windows version.
/var/opt/picasa with permissions 1777, and Picasa will use a subdirectory of that instead of ~/.picasa. See the comments in /opt/picasa/bin/wrapper.
really? what crack are you smoking. I have tried it and I have ran into some of the below released bugs that the Picasa guys admit to.
# You can't backup pictures or burn CDs
# The system tray does not close with loss of focus
If you bring up the media detector menu, you have to either start picasa or stop the media detector to get the menu to go away.
# If you have a remote home directory, the performance may be poor. Picasa uses many small files in the ~/.picasa directory, and if the home directory is slow, then Picasa will be slow. Picasa will warn you if it detects your home directory is on NFS. To work around this, you can create the directory
# Picasa notices don't stay on a given desktop.
Picasa pops up notices to let you know it's found new photos or has added photos to its library. These notices come on the current desktop; some users would rather they stayed on the same desktop that Picasa itself was on.
# On Ubuntu 5.10, the 'Ctrl-K' shortcut for keywords doesn't behave correctly.
Using the menu works correctly.
# Dual head video cards don't work properly with Picasa for slideshows and timelines and so operate in a fallback mode.
# Blogging - the palette selector is truncated.
You can't change colors of text while posting to your blog.
# Music playback during slideshow doesn't work
# The opening Picasa dialog has a spin loop and consumes a lot of CPU
# We do not support browsing to hidden directories
Funny I dont have those problems in the Windows version.
You must be a microsoft developer to consider picasa "It is extremely well-polished and as stable as the Windows version." with some of those big show stoppers in there.
The first one on the list is a major show stopper for me and nearly 50% of picasa users.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
In this fashion it is absolutely no different than if the app linked to GTK or QT to release a "native" version. It is native. It is compiled for and runs under Linux without any API emulators or ABI interfaces required. That is the definition of a native application.
Actually... from this post on the Wine devel mailing listCan anyone confirm that the Windows and Linux binary are identical? If true it should be read as Google pays Codeweavers to fix Wine to run Picasa. Which I guess is still a good thing.
The best education consists in immunizing people against systematic attempts at education. - Paul Feyerabend
Wine has been a silly idea from the start, and is as important to public adoption of Linux as the Windows emulation in OS/2 was (destructive rather than constructive). In other words, it makes everyone say, if I am just emulating windows, why not run the real thing, instead of the reverse tactic, having good applications that are desirable on Windows, get there through hacky procedures like Cygwin, and eventually leads people to believe that Linux is the real thing they should be running.
What is this need for special software for "managing my photos", anyways?
I never understood it...
I just use a little thing called "directories". Hey, Nautilus and Thunar and Konqueror and Windows Explorer even have these nifty "thumbnail" things that allow me to see them all at once!
Why would I need special software for this purpose?
I'm honestly curious here... I've never been "managing my photos" and thought, "hey I wish I had a special application that could show me all the pictures in thumbnail format so I can organize them into directories..."
Granted, I've never tried Picassa.
What's so great about it?
No source? Okay, that's understandable (I guess), and I have to admit, I still buy closed source games (for Linux). But . . .
It uses WINE? With all due respect to the hard work put in by CodeWeavers and countless others on WINE, WINE is not the answer. WINE is a stopgap measure, a way to open people's eyes to the power and Freedom of open source while still letting them use apps they are comfortable with. When you have the source code to an application and you use WINE to "port" it instead, that shows that you are either really lazy (which I'll grant is one of the three great virtues of programmers), or you aren't really interested in porting your software to Linux.
And that's not even getting into the fact that WINE is ia32 only, so this only runs on one of the many platforms that Linux runs on. If they'd only open source it, I predict it would soon become a true port without WINE, and run on all platforms that Linux runs on.
This isn't software for Linux; the correct title of this article should be "Google Donates Patches to WINE" with a sideline that WINE now runs Picasa.
Nathan's blog
WINE is what lets me run Linux on my work computer. I can run the one legacy application I really need, and use native Linux applications for everything else. If WINE didn't exist, I'd be stuck on XP.
So I don't see WINE as destructive or silly.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
"Someone offers you to come live in their country, but only under the condition that you keep very quiet about your own opinions and never criticize the government."
You are referring to the Netherlands, I assume?
#DeleteChrome
This is the real importance of the announcement, IMHO.
Remember, WINE is not an emulator. It's a reimplementation of the Windows API (i.e. a "clone"). As such, it's only as good as its weakest component and while WINE is quite good at a lot of programs, there's still a good deal missing.
The reason WINE is so important is two-fold. One, it's another attack vector and if you want to fight the Microsoft monoculture, you need all the attack vectors you can get. Two, it allows more people to switch to linux, even if a mission-critical application isn't natively available. Personally, I would have a really hard time without VirtualDub and despite being FOSS, there's no Linux version and no plan for one (and, no, I don't have the time - and probably the skills - to do it myself).
That said, I don't understand why Google did it this way. It would be so much easier to make a Linux version from scratch (using Qt or GTK+). Don't get me wrong, I'm happy they are doing it this way. I think massive improvements to WINE and the added focus on it are much more valuable than having a Linux native version of Picassa (which really only adds a bit of polish to already existing Linux applications).