Two days ago i read a news from RSS which said that Google will release Picasa will be available on GNU/Linux. I visit the Picasa's homepage and i didn't find any link about the GNU/Linux version, so i waited a day and finally they released it officially on their website. Yes, Picasa for GNU/Linux is now available, thanks to CodeWeaver who shares their code and being optimized by Picasa development team in order to make Picasa running at GNU/Linux platform. I have installed them and it worked nicely, even though some features are missing, such as burning to CD, backup, and export to TiVo. I also notice that it took longer time to open a big photo (such as original photo from digital camera), but i don't think that's a big problem, as Picasa currently are running using optimized and modified version of Wine. The menubar interfaces are not as good in Windows, but you will get used to it as most of the function can be called without using the menubar.
You don't need many packages in order to install Picasa, as most of them are normal packages, such as GCC 2.3 and higher, working X11 display system, GNOME and KDE (for integration only, you can use other Window Manager, though), and kernel 2.6.13 and HAL 0.56 above if you need automatic camera detection (though some camera failed to be automatically detected by Picasa).
Besides of the inactive function, all of the function implemented in Picasa were running well. I can add star or label, giving a sephia effect, rotating the images, making movies, slideshow and others without problems. The only problem i encountered was when i tried to make a screensaver by using this application. It didn't work on my system, and i'm not suprised by that, since it has been stated in the FAQ section that there are so many different implementation of Screensaver in GNU/Linux, so i should read the documentation carefully in order to make this works (but i doubt i will do that, as i never use screensaver on my laptop. I usually close the monitor when i'm not using it).
Nice job Google. I'm waiting for other application to be ported to GNU/Linux platform.
No comments:
Post a Comment