Download Google Picasa for Linux 2.2.2820-5

A_L points out the following mess: “Google has made its photo management program Picasa available for Linux. Since the programmers did not have enough time for a native port to the Linux platform, they chose a middle way, namely by using Wine. For this, the Google programmers contributed code to the Wine source for the non-working parts of Picasa. The code of Picasa itself is not available. The program can only be downloaded and used as a binary. About availability: see you at the moment it looks like it’s only available for download in the US Google Labs does mention it, but the webpage cannot be reached outside the USA. The page can be done via a detour at Google itself being approached.”

Picasa allows you to easily manage, edit and put photos online. The program offers several options for adjusting photos, including straightening the horizon, adjusting the contrast and cropping. Picasa for Linux is the Linux counterpart to the regular Picasa edition that was only made available for WIndows. The Linux edition of the image editor can be downloaded as rpm-, the B– and bin-file. Wine’s developers, who helped get Picasa on Linux, let know the following:

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.[break]