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."

Comments

don't forget to read this ;)

[msh104]

it's quite interesting
http://www.winehq.com/pipermail/wine-devel/2006-Ma y/047806.html

Re:What are you smoking?

[Lumpy]

From your comments I would venture you have not. It is extremely well-polished and as stable as the Windows version.

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 /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.
# 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.

Re:What are you smoking?

[Stalyn]

The app does not "run under wine". It links against WineLib. Big sh*t.

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 list

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.

Can 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.