Picasa 3.6 linux

It seems a lot of people are using Picasa under Ubuntu (which is a bit of surprise to me – I would have though people prefere gThumb or digiKam). But Picasa 3.6 has a really interesting feature: face recognition – and that might be very valuable to some.

The latest Picasa version – 3.6 – is not that easy to install so I though I’d post about installing Picasa 3.6 under Ubuntu with simple copy/paste commands (except one step in which you’ll have to install something visually).

Sure, you can simply install the Picasa 3.6 Windows binaries and directly run it under Wine, but Picasa 3.6 will lack Linux integration (with Gnome, KDE, etc.) such as:

  • Camera/media detection integrated with Gnome/KDE.
  • Mozilla/Firefox browser integration done via a plugin.
  • picasa:// urls work in Firefox 3.
  • Downloading albums from Picasa Web Albums launches faster.
  • Xinerama support.

Here is how to install Picasa 3.6 over the original Picasa 3.0 for Linux.

Step 1: Ubuntu Karmic, Jaunty, Intrepid and Hardy (Lucid users: skip this step since the latest Wine version is already in the Lucid repositories)

- Karmic:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-wine/ppa

Jaunty, Intrepid and Hardy:

echo "deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/ubuntu-wine/ppa/ubuntu  $(lsb_release -sc) main" | sudo tee -a /etc/apt/sources.listsudo apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys F9CB8DB0

Step 2: Install WINE

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install wine

Step 3: Add the Google Testing PPA

sudo sh -c "echo 'deb http://dl.google.com/linux/deb/ testing non-free' >> /etc/apt/sources.list"

Step 4: Install Picasa 3.0

Yes, Picasa 3.0, but we’ll update it in the next step:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install picasa

Step 5: Download and install Picasa 3.6 for Windows

cd ~/Desktop && wget http://dl.google.com/picasa/picasa36-setup.exechmod +x ~/Desktop/picasa36-setup.exe #this is required for Lucid to be able to run the exe file

Then double click the picasa36-setup.exe file on your desktop and install Picasa with the default settings.

Step 6: Now all we have to do is copy the Picasa 3.6 files over 3.0

sudo cp -r ~/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/Google/Picasa3/* /opt/google/picasa/3.0/wine/drive_c/Program Files/Google/Picasa3/

Now run Picasa 3.6 from Applications > Graphics > Picasa > Picasa

Important note: Don’t click the “Places” button as it will freeze Picasa 3.6 and it will fail to start again!

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