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Google Businesses The Internet Software Linux

Google Windows Apps Coming To Linux 298

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the google's-root-getting-stronger dept.
skaet writes "DesktopLinux.com reports that Google is working together with CodeWeavers to bring their photo editing and sharing program Picasa, formerly only available on Windows, over to Linux. From the article: '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.'"
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Google Windows Apps Coming To Linux

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  • Google earth?? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Google earth on linux please!
    • Was my first thought too. "Crossing fingers"

    • Re:Google earth?? (Score:3, Informative)

      by Maïdjeurtam ( 101190 )
      Isn't Google Earth using Qt [trolltech.com] (and OpenGL, of course)? It would make the Wine step completely useless, since Qt works natively on Linux. And so does OpenGL.

      I believe it's using Qt, at least in its OS X version, because when Google Earth beta for Mac was issued a few months ago, there were lots of complains that it just didn't "feel" like a Mac app, and the reason for this was it was using Qt instead of one of Apple's toolkits.
    • Instead of hoping and praying that Google will do what you want, why not look at NASA's World Wind and port it to Linux yourself? This is an Open Source world -- stop being so passive.
      -russ

  • Who'd have guessed? (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Google? Beta? Who'd have guessed?

  • Wine Source Code Patching (Score:5, Interesting)

    by EdMcMan ( 70171 ) <moo.slashdot2.z.edmcman@xoxy.net> on Tuesday February 14, 2006 @07:30AM (#14714962) Homepage Journal
    I knew Wine started out as a tool to migrate source code bases from Windows to Linux, but this is the first time I've heard of it being used for that (as opposed to doing conversions at runtime).
    • Few years ago, A beta version of Canvas from Deneba (a vector graphic application ) was available until they cancelled the project.
    • Borland used Wine to port their Delphi IDE to Linux a while back. It didn't work out well, and that's part of the reason why Kylix is not longer being developed.

    • Re:Wine Source Code Patching (Score:4, Interesting)

      by tabrisnet ( 722816 ) on Tuesday February 14, 2006 @07:40AM (#14715011)
      Plus there was Corel Office 2000, tho I'm not sure that they ever _finished_ that project. Meanwhile, Corel made a lot of contributions to WINE during that timeframe.

    • Re:Wine Source Code Patching (Score:4, Insightful)

      by aug24 ( 38229 ) on Tuesday February 14, 2006 @07:57AM (#14715080) Homepage
      AFAIK, the entire API of wine is provided in the WineLib headers, which means that windows source can be statically compiled against it (assuming all the APIs you want are there which is mostly true now).

      Usually however, people don't have the windows source, so the runtime implementations are used and the calls become dynamic. There's the same code behind of course.

      There should be a Wine expert along shortly to point out the gross over-simplification in what I've just said ;-)

      Justin.
    • IBM has used it, oh, and loki used it (I think), I think what your looking for is a mainstream application being ported to *nix using Wine, it has been done from mainstream vendors on a sort of 'trial' basis, but never advertised. It has been done in the past and then the products have always died a more silent death with less noise than they were born.
      On the other hand, I would hardly call this a mainstream application, even though it comes from a well known corporate vendor.
      I am not normally the pessimist
      • I don't know, I think the application is mainstream enough. It's one of the applications that's keeping my parents on windows, if they do port it well I may have to reconsider pushing them into the 21st century.

      • LOKI did not use wine (Score:3, Informative)

        by rsd ( 194962 )
        LOKI did not use WINE to port the games.

        They really ported the games to linux, meaning that the games were linux pure binary with no
        "emulation" layer (even thought that WINE Is Not an Emulator).

        They job were "simpler" because most of the time they had to translate
        direct3D to openGL (if the game did not have an openGL driver),
        DirectSound to OpenAudio (or something like that equivalent to openGL for
        sound that they created) and the rest of DirectX to SDL.

        Basically the game source became mostly thru cross-plata
    • The ReactOS [reactos.org] project (they're working on a Free Windows clone) also used a lot of Wine source to get where they are now.
    • Wine doesn't do conversions at runtime. It's not an emulator. Wine is a set of DLLs and a loader for PE files (necessary because Linux uses ELF). The reason nobody uses winelib is because it's completely pointless. Using DLLs is just as fast and tends to save a lot of space on your hard drive over static linking.
    • CorelDraw was ported to Linux using Wine. I had the Beta. It worked OK, but it was rather too slow on my PII @400MHz PC running Linux. At the time, that was a fairly high-spec PC. However, the equivalent Windows version was just fine on a lower-powered PII 266. Since then Wine has come on quite a long way, thanks in part to Corel's efforts and obviously those of CodeWeavers. However, relying on Wine to do your cross-platform development is no substitute for using a "proper" cross-platform toolkit.

  • Ughhh..... (Score:2, Insightful)

    by segedunum ( 883035 )
    Wine. So that means their still Windows applications then?

    • Re:Ughhh..... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by makomk ( 752139 ) on Tuesday February 14, 2006 @07:37AM (#14714992) Journal
      Wine. So that means their still Windows applications then?

      Sort of. If they're porting it in the usual way, it'll still use the Windows API but will be a Linux ELF binary. (The actual program binary *might* be a shared object, depending on whether CodeWeavers use the standard wineport tools or some custom-developed toolkit of their own).

    • Re:Ughhh..... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by gutnor ( 872759 ) on Tuesday February 14, 2006 @07:59AM (#14715099)
      Technically maybe but what is important is that for a linux user it looks like a linux application. It will be supported like a Linux application.
      It is not a hack you need to do and support yourself in the back of the original developer.

      In any cross-platform development you try to limit the difference between different platform source trees, generally you isolate all platform specific functions in a common framework and only port the common framework on different platforms, leaving the rest of code unchanged.
      There are plenty of cross-platform frameworks for plenty of use ( from simply using stdio.h to opengl ), in this case they choosed WINE. That is surprising yes, but that does make sense for a project that need to be crossplatform retroactively.

      You can see that Google apps are still Windows applications but you can see them as using a cross platform framework developped conjointly by Microsoft on Windows and WINE team on Linux :-)

  • Yuck (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 14, 2006 @07:33AM (#14714972)
    Using programs in wine is painful. It's definitely one of those areas where you only do it if you have to, not if you have a choice. Since Picasa is hardly the only such program available for Linux, why bother if it's only going to be half-assed? Who wants to manage a wine installation to run Picasa. Anyone? Do any of you really want this?

    The solution to complaints that Google makes no effort to port their software to Linux isn't to get CodeWeavers to make it run when used with winelib. It's to port the software to Linux. Otherwise just tell Linux users to sod off, because that's basically what linking with wine is doing.

    • Re:Yuck (Score:5, Insightful)

      by raventh1 ( 581261 ) on Tuesday February 14, 2006 @07:37AM (#14714996)
      First: You have to commend them because they are taking any step to cross-platform.
      Second: If any step succeeds, another is likely to be taken.
      Third: Other companies will be watching Google, and they may decide it's worth the time to at least start with wine. A foot in the door may lead to a complete port.
      • But the problem with Wine is one of quality. That's not to suggest that the Wine team hasn't done a great job. They sure have, considering what they have to work with (the Win16 and Win32 APIs). But the past ports of software to Linux via Wine have been terrible. Kylix is one example, and the port of WordPerfect by Corel another. They were slow, buggy, and not very impressive.

        • Re:Not a good way to do it, however. (Score:5, Insightful)

          by strider44 ( 650833 ) on Tuesday February 14, 2006 @08:06AM (#14715124)
          They were also a long time ago, at least in terms of computers. Wine has come leaps and bounds especially in terms of stability in just the last year. One of the main ideas behind this however is that Google will know which functions are needed, which lightens the set almost immeasurably. This is a relatively small program compared to WordPerfect so all they need to do is ensure those functions they use are stable, and when they want to port another program along they need to expand the set of functions that they need to be stable to incorperate the functions that program needs and do the maintenance job on that.

          They also have the advantage in that they can modify Wine to suit the program and the program to suit Linux should they need it, and advantage that you don't have running Wine on your average computer. They can, for example, rewrite the file loading code to take advantage of the GTK file selecter and grab the files directly from the operating system. They don't *need* to go through the C:\ file system emulation, one of the bigger issues with Wine. They can also probably with small modifications route their audio through GStreamer, cutting out the Wine audio library which is sometimes considered buggy. If a certain section of the program proves buggy, they can simply port that section and do the rest through Wine.

          Seriously, I think if a Linux version of Picasso ends up buggy then it's Google's fault, not Wine.

    • Re:Yuck (Score:5, Insightful)

      by lahvak ( 69490 ) on Tuesday February 14, 2006 @07:48AM (#14715039) Homepage Journal
      It's not going to run "in wine". They are linking it with winelib to make it into a native Linux application without having to completely rewrite it. Winelib provides the interface between Windows API and Linux API. It is similar to porting Unix applications to Windows using Cygwin.

      • Re:Yuck (Score:3, Insightful)

        by alienw ( 585907 )
        There is no difference between Winelib and Wine applications. This is a myth. It's about as much of a difference as linking a program statically versus using dynamic libraries. It's not noticeable from the end-user point of view. A winelib app can have just as many bugs and will be just as fast (or slow) as the wine version.
      • Do you count a cygwin release as a windows port? I know I don't. It's not a port until it's done natively.

    • Re:Yuck (Score:3, Interesting)

      by pjbgravely ( 751384 )
      Linux users feel that because Google built their system on Linux that they should give back to the community by porting their closed source apps to Linux. Of course this did not happen and I am sure some people were angry because of it.

      We have to remember that Google does pay for Linux apps through bounties so they are giving something back. I doubt we will see real ports until a killer worm takes out 50% of all Microsoft Windows boxes.
    • Who wants to manage a wine installation to run Picasa. Anyone? Do any of you really want this?

      We all joke about it a lot, but you really should rtfa before complaining.

      You needn't manage a wine installation to run this ported app in linux. The install is just gonna be a matter of installing Picasa by itself. The needed parts of wine will be statically linked and not something you need to touch or fret at all. It will not use your existing wine install. One of the goals listed is that they intend to make
  • For those who remember Kylix, this sounds like an awful idea. Borland basically did the same thing with their Delphi IDE when they ported it to Linux, and it turned out very poorly.

    It was slow, crash-prone, and just plain messy to install. While WINE has likely improved since then, I'm still not convinced that it is suitable for use in production applications.

    • Well, you're entitled to your opinion. But for factual matters:
      • Kylix did not use even a smidgen of Wine.
      • Kylix generated regular executable Linux a.out files.
      • In the three days I spent trying out Kylix, it did not crash, not once.
      • It would crash gdb, but that was a gdb problem.
      • It would also crash if you had the wrong system libraries installed.
      • I would have kept on using it but the boss said "no".

  • Google and "limited beta"? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Opportunist ( 166417 ) on Tuesday February 14, 2006 @07:37AM (#14714988)
    Does this mean every Beta-Tester gets like 5000 invites, and everyone they invite gets another 5000?

    Btw, anyone want a GMail account?
  • Typically when one says their software support Linux, it means that their program can be compiled (or at least easily ported to) the major non-x86 platforms, including PPC and SPARC.

    Wine, however, is only for x86-compatible systems. Will this software from Google only run on x86 Linux systems, and not on PPC Linux and SPARC Linux, amongst other Linux ports?

  • This gives me a very odd feeling. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Volanin ( 935080 ) on Tuesday February 14, 2006 @07:38AM (#14715003)
    From the article:

    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).

    This gives me a very odd feeling.
    While for one side this will be very good for Linux users as this technology may be used in the future, allowing a fast deployment and development of very good programs, will this also mark a real beginning for Linux closed-source programs and binary installations?

  • Quick question... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by PinkyDead ( 862370 ) on Tuesday February 14, 2006 @07:47AM (#14715037) Journal
    I've already got Picasa up and running on Wine, but I never use it because it references files on the c: drive (shudder) - will that be the case with this thing - or will there be proper paths?

  • Headline: (Score:5, Insightful)

    by blkros ( 304521 ) <blkros AT yahoo DOT com> on Tuesday February 14, 2006 @07:51AM (#14715056)
    Google Throws Linux Users a Bone
    An old, marrowless, dried up, bone, with no meat on it, and, yet, there it is.
    Basically they're making a Windows app run on Linux, using Wine. Why didn't we think of that?

  • People will moan and bitch about more free stuff (Score:5, Interesting)

    by valen ( 2689 ) on Tuesday February 14, 2006 @07:54AM (#14715066) Homepage

      Given Google don't make any money from Picasa, the Linux client is a loss-leader. So, it makes sense to get the first Linux version in the easiest way possible. And that is Wine. That's what it was written for. In the free software world, there is always someone who will say "I want that for free!", and "Now that I have it for free, I want it better". If you do that in a restaurant, they'll sprinkle crumbled turd on your food. On the internet, all they can do is ignore you.

      Check out the code contributions - there are lots of bugs found & fixed by the Google guys that are working on this. It's not like they are saying "Go run on wine, we don't care", it's "Go run on wine, and we've given you the most help we can".

      A tool like Picasa, which was written from the ground up for Windows, is not a candidate for a "Linux Port". It would need a "Linux re-write". Maybe a future version could be built using tools to help with platform independance...but Google have much bigger things to worry about.

    John
    • I'm just guessing but presumably they make money when you order prints from Picasa? e.g. Kodak pay them a referral fee?
    • Do you really want the majority of Linux software to turn into what they have on Windows and Macs? The vast majority of software on those platforms is binary-only shareware. Everytime some pissant little programmer writes a program to do anything of consequence they slap on a registration requirement and it instantly costs $25-$50 for some stupid little utility. With Linux, on the other hand, the vast majority of software is not only completely free, it's open source! Unless we continue to support open
      • I would quite like to see the commercial Linux software market take off. There is a lot of good open source software and there are a lot of crappy utilities that cost money on Windows, but a lot of the commercial software is far better quality than any Free alternative (compare PS Elements 4 for ~$80 to the free alternatives, for example). I will gladly pay money for software if it saves me time and effort.
      • Y'know what? If you don't like shareware, don't use it. Use the free stuff. I like free stuff, you like free stuff, we ALL like free stuff. It's not like it's gonna dry up and blow away, and some competition from closed source apps would be good all around I think. If the free app can't hold up against some "stupid little utility", well then it probably wasn't that good to begin with, and the only reason it was being used was because it was free, and the only game in town. To me, the main rallying point of
    • Given Google don't make any money from Picasa, the Linux client is a loss-leader

      They don't make money for sure but they get exposure. People will recognize the brand "Google", use their search engines more, click on adds supplied by Google and $PROFIT$! My mother, a total computer illiterate, uses Google above anything else. For her Google is the internet. And IMO that is what google is doing by giving away free software. It's a PR move, pure and simple, to promote the brand, Google.

      Companies don't give out
    • I'm mostly a little disappointed that they didn't write their apps in a cross platform manner to start with. There really is no good reason for that, is there? Especially as they most certainly would know there would be a demand for it? It's one thing to have old legacy apps that would be hell to port, quite another to paint yourself into the corner with eyes wide open.

      All in all, I like what they are doing, but I am a bit unhappy that Windows is treated so special.

  • Earthiness? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by jgrindal ( 954400 )
    Does this mean that, at long last, we can play with Google Earth on linux?! Why that would make this day almost worth keeping around!

  • A hint of things to come? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by dhart ( 1261 ) * on Tuesday February 14, 2006 @07:59AM (#14715098)
    Perhaps Google is quietly gaining experience with desktop Linux (Ubuntu) and WINE for a future assault on the Microsoft-dominated desktop. Microsoft will try very hard to switch people away from win32 apps and onto WinFX apps, where they have much tighter control (patents, DRM, etc.). Also, Microsoft knows that win32 will soon be 99%+ reverse engineered to run on Linux, so they have a huge interest in killing win32. Circa 1999 Intel wanted to kill x86 to increase profit margins and gain a tighter control of the market via IA-64 (Itanium), a highly IP-encumbered ISA. In the process, Intel left an x86-64 gap. If Microsoft leaves a win32 gap, like Intel did with x86-64, perhaps Google will fill that gap with Linux/win32, just as AMD filled Intel's gap with AMD64, leaving Intel scrambling and Itanium stagnating. I would guess that Microsoft will do better with WinFX than Intel is doing with Itanium, but how much better is the interesting question!

  • native (Score:2, Insightful)

    by goarilla ( 908067 )
    I wonder why they just dont make a native port?
  • Anyone remember how transparent it was to run Corel's wine-remixed WordPerfect Office?

    Wine has come a long way since then, so I suppose it could be translucent.

  • Cool (Score:3, Informative)

    by bogie ( 31020 ) on Tuesday February 14, 2006 @08:22AM (#14715208) Journal
    I gotta say nothing out there for linux even remotely compares to Picasa. I tried F-spot the other day and man is it still very alpha compared to Picasa. Digikam is the closest but if Picasa runs smoothly and keeps its online photo service access then I see it becoming very popular. It's just a pleasure to use and you can get very good results with little effort. I've been using it since before Google bought the previous owner out and it's worked out well for anyone I've showed it to.

    People complaining should be happy that anyone at all these day is bothering with porting over desktop apps to linux.

  • Google Earth (Score:3, Informative)

    by rtos ( 179649 ) on Tuesday February 14, 2006 @08:29AM (#14715248) Homepage
    What people really want isn't to organize their photos with Picasa [google.com]... they want [keyhole.com] Google Earth [google.com]. That's the app that would be extremely cool to have available on Linux.

    Yeah, it already works in Wine [gentoo-wiki.com], but it would be nice to be able to run it without that.

  • Oh goody. Can't wait. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by squoozer ( 730327 ) on Tuesday February 14, 2006 @08:53AM (#14715386)

    Why are they bothering? This is going to be greeted with all the enthusiasm of someone breaking wind in a swimming pool. It's great that Google have realized that it has people who want to use it's services that run linux but unless they are going to do the porting job properly I don't think they should do it at all.

    Perhaps that's a little harsh but I don't want some clunky Windows app with a ton of Wine libs following it around cluttering up my system. Personally I find digiCam to be as good if not better than Picasa so I think I'll stick with that - certainly on Linux I feel that is the application they are competing against.

  • Good for Google. (Score:2, Insightful)

    by spicyed ( 954272 )
    It's great that google realizes that programs need to be ported to linux, however hopefully you don't need to use codeweavers software to use it. Or wine even, I don't want to have to install wine myself to use this, it would be nice if Google wrapped winelib in with Picassa. (which they most likely should).
  • From the article:

    Wine is not, as has sometimes been said, a Windows emulator...

    Next Paragraph:

    The new program is reportedly re-tooled to work perfectly under CodeWeaver's CrossOver Office Wine emulation.

    If I hadn't spent countless hours trying to get ANYTHING useful running in Wine, I might be confused.

  • Why do it half assed (Score:4, Insightful)

    by TheSkepticalOptimist ( 898384 ) on Tuesday February 14, 2006 @09:20AM (#14715555)
    Honestly, if Google was truely serious about creating a Linux based GOOS then why do a half assed "port" of picasa using Wine. Wine has always resulted in half assed implementations of Windows software, often lacking real performance and often many features disabled. I am surprise Google with all their newly minted billions would not just higher a bunch of Linux Developers and make a native Linux version of Picasa.

    And don't fool yourselves, Wine IS an emulator. Anything that has to mediate between native software code and native OS/Hardware code is an emulator. It may not be a hardware emulator (i.e. not translating to machine code the software code wasn't written for), but it is a software emulator translating windows calls to Linux calls. And in any case, emulators are slow.

    • Anything that has to mediate between native software code and native OS/Hardware code is an emulator.

      Are GTK, QT, and Mono emulators?

      Hell, what about XGL and/or Xorg? Or GTK on Win32? What about Cygwin? What about Xen, or VMware, or Java?

      What is an emulator, anyways? What's the difference between "native" and "foreign"? How many layers of translation are okay? What if an app relies on libc? That's "translation" between native (assembly) code and the hardware.

      Your understanding of these things is very, ver

  • Ha! (Score:2)

    by Ahaldra ( 534852 )
    How great! Now I can so look forward to running this on my linux box...

    Wha? what do you mean "only runs on intel processors"? You mean this is x86-binary only? Yeah that mindset served us really well in the past...

    Maybe that's just me, but until they GPL their code this is a non-story. Wine getting more bugfixes on the other hand is good news. It's always nice to see an open source project progress - especially with help from commercial vendors.

  • Wordperfect Office 2000 for Linux anyone? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by caseih ( 160668 ) on Tuesday February 14, 2006 @10:53AM (#14716238)
    Remember when Corel "ported" Wordperfect to Linux? They used wine and it was a miserable failure. However Corel's attempt failed where google might succeed as maybe google won't make the same mistakes.

    Corel forked wine to add some custom features they needed that head wine didn't have (fonts and printing, for example). This fork proved their undoing. It was never synced back to the head branch and soon died, orphaning their version of wine. Further glibc advances broke wine with every release, effectively preventing corel's wine from running on anything newer than RH 7.

    As long as google doesn't do the same thing, we'll probably be okay.

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