Now Google’s Picasa for Linux

Likhil    Linux    

Now we can use the free Google’s Picasa in Linux. 
There are two package’s which can be download

Free Download (.rpm) – for Red Hat/Fedora/Suse/Mandriva
Free Download (.deb) – for Debian/Ubuntu

Google’s Picasa is all about photos — it helps you instantly find, edit, and share all the pictures on your computer. Although it isn’t released as open source it is free to download and use from Google’s Web site. The new version 3, which is currently in beta, is available for Windows as well as Linux.

Version 3 has some great new features, including a new retouch tool to remove unsightly blemishes from your photos. If you don’t want to download the beta, the previous stable version is still available.

Google and CodeWeavers Inc. are working together to bring Google’s popular Windows Picasa photo editing and sharing program to Linux. The program is now in a limited beta test. If this program is successful, other Google applications will be following it to the Linux desktop, sources say.

The Linux Picasa implementation includes the full feature set of the Windows Picasa 2.x software. It is not, strictly speaking, a port of Picasa to Linux. Instead, Linux Picasa combines Windows Picasa code and Wine technology to run Windows Picasa on Linux. This, however, will be transparent to Linux users, when they download, install, and run the free program on their systems.

Wine is an open-source implementation of the Windows API (application programming interface). It runs, in turn, on top of the X Window System and Linux (or Unix). Wine is not, as has sometimes been said, a Windows emulator. Wine provides a Windows API middleware layer that enables Windows programs, such as Office 2003, to run on Linux without the slowing effects of an operating system emulation or a virtual machine. Indeed, in some respects, Wine on Linux is faster than XP on the same hardware.

The new program is reportedly re-tooled to work perfectly under CodeWeaver’s CrossOver Office Wine emulation. This may mean that Linux Picasa is using the program’s own native Windows DLLs (dynamic link libraries). Wine enables developers to use Windows DLLs for greater speed when they’re available.

The free Linux Picasa download will include a runtime version of CodeWeavers’s modified Wine, so that users can simply download the package from Google and run it on their Linux system. Users will not need to download and install Wine, or to purchase CodeWeavers’s commercial version of Wine, CrossOver Office.

Sources close to the project said that the Linux version of Picasa is meant to be as easy to install as the Windows version.

Sources close to CodeWeavers, though, said that CodeWeavers has been tasked with the job of making sure that Picasa will work well with Wine and Linux. If successful, future versions of Picasa will be written to the Wine APIs so that the program can easily run on both Windows and Linux with Wine.

According to sources close to Google, another popular Google Windows program is also coming over to Linux: the Google Talk client. lol 

This project, however, is not going through CodeWeavers. Instead, sources indicate that a beta version of Google Talk for Linux has been created within Google.

Cheers,

Likhil Nelliyat

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