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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."
So, use coral as your proxy :)
h tml
http://picasa.google.com.nyud.net:8080/linux/
http://picasa.google.com.nyud.net:8080/linux/faq.
Chris, looks good so far, big thanks.
liqbase
You can get the binaries directly (regardless of location) from these links:
c asa/picasa_2.2.2820-5_i386.deb
- 2.2.2820-5.i386.rpm
2 820-5.i386.bin
Deb: http://dl.google.com/linux/deb/pool/non-free/p/pi
RPM: http://dl.google.com/linux/rpm/stable/i386/picasa
Binary installer: http://dl.google.com/linux/standalone/picasa-2.2.
And while we're at it. There is a free alternative. It has even got all the spiffy KDE features like ioslaves and so on at its hands. Plus all the cameras supported that gphoto2 has.
[--- PGP key and more on http://www.root42.de ---]
libgphoto is an OSS library for interfacing with digital cameras. Marcus Meissner is a major Wine developer. 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.
Typical Linux whine.
No where in this annoucement do they say that they are releasing Picasa as open source software. They do allow use of it free of charge.
Software developers are really in a bind with Linux. If you don't create software for Linux, Linux people whine that you are not supporting them.
Create software for Linux, Linux people whine that its not open source.
Picasa is an awesome photo management application. Be glad Google ported it to Linux, and that you can use it for free. If you demand that all software you use is open source, look elsewhere. Note that there are many useful applications that developers, for many reasons, don't want to release as open source. Limiting yourself to open source limits your choices.
One or two problems remain (and I'm sure more will pop up after I play with it for more than 10 minutes). It doesn't integrate into any desktop environment at all - its very much a Windows application hacked to bits so it runs smoothly in Linux, and it shows at points. With the exception of Desktop, it does not remember stored folders from either Konqueror or Nautilus, and maintains meaningless links to "My Documents", "My Pictures", "My Music" and other folders which don't exist in the file requesters. This could use some work.
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. Initially, it may seem that standing firm in your belief in free speech would limit your choices -- you would have to turn down the offer to live in that country. It is not hard to see, however, how abandoning free speech is what really would deprive you of your freedom. Who knows, after some time you might not even be able to leave their country, would you wish to do so.
Swedish plasma phys. PhD student; MSc EE; knows maths, programming, electronics; finance interest; seeks opportunities
Google funded 225 WINE patches. How many people who won't even use Picasa will benefit from that? IMHO, that's more important than Google releasing a package that lets Picasa run on Linux.
Why announce a fairly standard application on /.? Surely Freshmeat would be a better forum?
Because it's from GOOGLE.
Slashdot:
News about Google. Stuff about Google that matters. Google, Google. Google.
Software Wars
it's quite interestinga y/047806.html
http://www.winehq.com/pipermail/wine-devel/2006-M
This announcement has very little to do with Picassa.
Read between the lines (or even one particular line, explicitly): OUR patches to wine.
Google, which has a proven track-record of success when they start off in some strange new direction, has taken on the task of making Wine work better.
Think about that for a minute, and you'll get the "big" news here.
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.
It's been fixed in CVS.
Well this is one of the scariest things i've ever had to witness on my process list in recent times...
Google have no obligations to the Linux/OSS communities, period. The fact that they've invested so much time, money and effort into not only their own Linux app, but also back to the Wine community should be applauded. Nobody is forcing you to use this. Don't like the way they've done it? Don't use it.
Seriously, give them a break. They're making baby steps in the right direction. They've released what, a pre-beta via their labs? And so many people on Slashdot are expecting it to be a polished product... that's just wrong. Their forte is definitely not Linux desktop apps, but from the sounds of things, they certainly want to improve. Oh shock! They're not there on day 1. Or day 2. Well, Linux wasn't written in a day, nor were the plethora of other desktop apps for Linux.
Let's not forget the human factor. Those programmers that worked on getting Picasa running on Google I'm sure would love some positive feedback to encourage them to continue working hard on it. I know I would. They're probably also unhappy that this pre-beta version isn't 'up to par' with the Windows version, but they're working on improving that. Reading their FAQ endeared the team that did this to me.
As for Wine usage. Big deal. It's not like they're charging you $69 for the app. It works, and they aim to improve it. Sounds to me like they had a hard time trying to get it to work on so many different distros, instead of just say.. Red Hat. This project was only announced 4-5 months ago. Let's hope to see Google Earth before Christmas!
This space for rent.
Second, Windows has several methods to interface with digital cameras. One of the is direct filesystem access (works just fine). The second is TWAIN. Originally just for scanners it is also used for digital cameras. On third, WIA (Windows Imaging Architecture).
WINE already had a TWAIN implementation (written by Corel during WordPerfect 2000 times) but it was only able to use SANE, and not really able to use libgphoto2 in a good way.
So what I did was to just add the lowlevel libgphoto TWAIN driver to WINE, and CodeWeavers provided a gphoto Import GUI for it. My part of work was small compared to the stuff the CodeWeavers people did.
Voila - importing from any kind of cameras into Picasa.
Btw, I think all of this is in regular WINE 0.9.14.
Ciao, Marcus