Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

New Google Apps For Linux Coming

Posted by kdawson on from the bated-breath dept.

techoon writes "The goal of the Google Linux Client Team is to develop Linux desktop applications, such as the official Linux versions of Google Earth and Google Picasa. This team made an interesting splash during a presentation at the first-ever Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit, which they had kindly hosted at their Mountain View campus. The Google presenters claimed some 'significant accomplishments' and other new Google desktop applications coming out this year for the Linux platform."

6 of 159 comments (clear)

  1. Native? by colourmyeyes · · Score: 5, Interesting

    As TFA says, Picasa for Linux wasn't native, just a Windows version repackaged with Wine. I hope the new stuff isn't like that.

    --
    My grandmother used anecdotal evidence all the time, and she lived to be 120 years old.
    1. Re:Native? by yincrash · · Score: 5, Interesting

      should they be writing picasa fom scratch? the wine versions help the wine project by submitting patches bringing more win32 apps usable to linux making linux a more and more appealing option.

    2. Re:Native? by colourmyeyes · · Score: 5, Insightful

      This misses the point of Wine. Wine is for running applications that CANNOT be ported, e.g. commercial software like MS Office. Applications that can be ported, should. Otherwise, they pack their own version of Wine, and it can conflict with a version of Wine a user already has installed.

      A native Linux version of Picasa doesn't seem preposterous to me. Google's done it with Google Earth.

      Using hacks like Wine (a great hack, but still a hack) to run applications on Linux makes it less appealing to me than running native software.

      --
      My grandmother used anecdotal evidence all the time, and she lived to be 120 years old.
  2. TFA is spam?? by bcrowell · · Score: 4, Informative

    What the heck? I clicked on the link to TFA. It sent me to a page at techrythm.com, where there is an extremely short article, giving hardly any more information than the slashdot summary. In it are a lot of links double-underlined in green. When I move my mouse over the links, I get an ad floating around. When I click on a link, I go to some lame spam page that doesn't seem to have anything to do with what the link claims it is.

    --
    Find free books.
    1. Re:TFA is spam?? by bcrowell · · Score: 5, Informative

      Sorry about the reply-to-self, but considering how incredibly annoying and misleading these adbrite ads are, I thought some slashdotters might be interested to know that adding http://*.adbrite.com/* to your adblock patterns seems to get rid of them completely -- the spam links don't even show up with the double underlining, which I imagine is because they're being inserted dynamically by a JS script served up from an adbrite server.

      --
      Find free books.
  3. Give us gtalk on linux already! by LingNoi · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Gtalk with all the features available that the windows version has, such as chat logging and voicemail support. If there was ever going to be a killer app this would be it.