Picasa for Linux
Google has just announced and made available the beta version of Picasa for the Linux/GNU operating system. Picasa scans and locates all photographs on your system and then presents them in a orderly fashion based on date taken and directory that it was found in. This nifty little tool also allows you to make semi advanced editing to the photographs. Once your photos are perfect, Picasa helps you to share the photos to friends via email, blogs, or print the photos.
The reason I am posting this article is not because Picasa is my personal choose in photo organizer, but because Google is showing very strong interests in the Free Software communities/users. Since last summer, Google has been sponsoring The Summer of Code. The Summer of Code motivates and helps students to join and take part in any Open Source project of their choosing or the student can create their own project. In turn, Google pays the student $4500 and $500 to the mentoring group that you signed up with. Last summer there were 400 students and 40 mentors from 49 countries taking part in The Summer of Code. Back to the topic at hand, Google has helped the Wine project and also the Mozilla project a great deal in order to make Picasa work flawlessly with both of these projects. You can find a list of patches made available by Google to the Wine project here.
Google has released Piccasa in the following package managers:
- RPM for Red Hat, Fedora, Suse, Mandriva x86
- DEB for Debian and Ubuntu x86
- .bin for all other distributions.
Overall, I am very happy with Google’s decision to support Open Source / Free Software projects. I believe by Google putting more emphasis on these project will help not only the Free Software communities grow but also introduce Free Software to new comers who might have never known or never gave thought to using more Free Software like Linux.
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