Re: Picasa for Linux available!

[Nick Law]

I 've loaded and installed the .bin version, installation went 
flawlessly,  I told it to index the whole hard drive it started doing 
that then after 30 seconds or do a message box poped up  --- FATAL ERROR 
-- "Picasa cannot continue", it completely hung, the OK button was 
unresponsive and I had to kill it in a unix window. Whether this had 
anything to do with it but as it was indexing I changed my mind and told 
it to index the hard disk only once rather than keep an eye out for changes.

The windows version indexed the hard drive with no errors, although I 
didn't change anything while it it scanning the disk.

Regards
Nick

Nick Law wrote:
> Another quick note.... just saw the mistake I made with the URL, so 
> here it is again ...
>
> This URL will display the pages in English but will not allow the 
> download to take place ... so read about it here ....
> http://www.freeproxy.us/index.php?q=aHR0cDovL3BpY2FzYS5nb29nbGUuY29tL2xpbnV4...
>
> then click on this link to download the same thing in French but this 
> URL will allow the download ..
> http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fpicasa.google.com%2Flin...
>
> Nick Law wrote:
> > Thanks Dan, impressive program. That link seems to be down though, as 
> > of 26/May/06 11:00GMT, however I downloaded and installed the latest 
> > version of Picasa for windows and ran it on wine 0.9.14 and it seems 
> > to run very well, there is a few fixme's but so far everything seems 
> > to work although I haven't by any means used all it's features 
> > (there's a lot of them).
> >
> > On the google picasa group, 
> > http://groups.google.com/group/Google-Labs-Picasa-for-Linux?lnk=srg 
> > there is also some mention of the link being down but only for 
> > outside the US, so here's a backdoor if the link doesn't work for you 
> > and your not in the US. 
> > http://groups.google.com/group/Google-Labs-Picasa-for-Linux?lnk=srg 
> > (It's a bit slow but seemed to work, just give it time)
> >
> > Nick
> >
> > Dan Kegel wrote:
> > > 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