Google Releases Picasa For Linux
Google has released a Linux version of its excellent photo software, Picasa. Picasa brings some great organization of images to Linux, along with its excellent job of downloading photos from digital cameras, which I can imagine is not perfect in Linux.
Rather than a new version of the program, Google has taken the Windows version of Picasa and tweaked it slightly to run under Wine, a Windows application emulator. It includes all of the major Picasa features and the entire interface, minus the Hello instant messenger, CD burning, and backup TiVo. While the Google Firefox toolbar can run under Linux, this is the first time they’ve developed a full application specifically for that platform.
There are some curious issues. Due to concerns about licensing video and MP3 codecs for Linux, Google didn’t include any of those, resulting in uncompressed slideshows without any sound. Sometimes people forget that the MP3 codec isn’t free, and, while people have brought it to Linux, you are supposed to pay for it. There are also issues with clicking to email or open a web browser, since those aren’t well standardized in Linux.
It should run on any of these Linux distros running on a an x86 compatible processor:
- Debian Sarge
- Debian Etch
- Fedora Core 4
- Fedora Core 5
- Linspire 5
- Mandriva 2006
- Mandriva 2005
- Red Hat Workstation 3
- Red Hat Workstation
- Ubuntu 5.10 (Breezy Badger)
- SuSE 9.3
- SuSE 10.0
Make sure to pore through the FAQ before you download. This isn’t Windows; you’ll want to know all the information before you install.
Q. What open source licenses does Picasa for Linux use?
Picasa was brought to the Linux platform with the help of a variety of free and open source software projects. We are grateful to the authors of these projects for allowing us to use their work. The nature of the licenses for these projects does give you some additional rights. Further, we have returned all work we did with those projects back to the projects in question. Please see either The Wine Project or Mozilla for more information on their licensing.
Go to http://code.google.com/wine.html for more details on the code that Google contributed.
This makes me shiver! It’s like the most geeky announcement I ever heard.
Comment by Randy Charles Morin | May 26, 2006
There has to be something in the TOS about putting your images over the Google Ads, such as that user is doing…
Comment by Jonathan D. | May 26, 2006
Wine is NOT an emulator. An emulator implies that windows instructions get translated on-the-fly. The Wine guys have reverse engineered the bulk of the WIN32 API and reimplemented them.
Comment by Stephane Rodriguez | May 27, 2006
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