Picasa for Linux available!
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
Dan Kegel wrote:
Google has indeed been working on Picasa, and it's finally available for download at http://labs.google.com/
I get a 404 on http://picasa.google.com/linux/. But great news anyway :-).
Am Freitag, 26. Mai 2006 10:19 schrieb Molle Bestefich:
Dan Kegel wrote:
Google has indeed been working on Picasa, and it's finally available for download at http://labs.google.com/
I get a 404 on http://picasa.google.com/linux/.
But great news anyway :-). Works only from inside the U.S. You can use google translator as a proxy
Stefan Dösinger wrote:
I get a 404 on http://picasa.google.com/linux/.
Works only from inside the U.S.
Lame. Why?
You can use google translator as a proxy
Hah! So you can. Funky :-D. Thanks!
Dan Kegel wrote:
Google has indeed been working on Picasa, and it's finally available for download at http://labs.google.com/ I tried this, and the link to the linux version apparently does not exist!
David
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
Am Donnerstag, den 25.05.2006, 18:50 -0700 schrieb Dan Kegel:
Google has indeed been working on Picasa, and it's finally available for download at http://labs.google.com/
Great! On the Labs-Page, the first Entry is: New! Picasa for Linux Google's photo organizer now available for Linux users. The Link-Target: http://picasa.google.com/linux/ results in: Google Error Not Found The requested URL /linux/ was not found on this server. -- By By ... ... Detlef
Detlef Riekenberg wrote:
New! Picasa for Linux Google's photo organizer now available for Linux users.
The Link-Target: http://picasa.google.com/linux/ results in:
Error
Not Found The requested URL /linux/ was not found on this server.
According to this (sorry if there's a line break): http://groups.google.com/group/Google-Labs-Picasa-for-Linux/browse_thread/th... ...the reason is that only users from the US can access the page at the moment for whatever reason. A workaround for others (from one of the posts in the thread above) is to use a proxy: http://www.freeproxy.us/index.php?q=aHR0cDovL3BpY2FzYS5nb29nbGUuY29tL2xpbnV4... Cheers, Cihan
Dan Kegel wrote:
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).
Hi Dan, can you provide more details about those two points (which cdrom driver and which drivers ?) A+
On 5/26/06, Eric Pouech <eric.pouech(a)wanadoo.fr> wrote:
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).
can you provide more details about those two points (which cdrom driver and which drivers ?)
participants (8)
-
Cihan Altinay -
Dan Kegel -
David Goodenough -
Detlef Riekenberg -
Eric Pouech -
Jeremy White -
Molle Bestefich -
Stefan Dösinger