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Google has recently made several products available for the Linux platform. Does this signal the beginning of a trend? I hope so!

The most recent, and a real surprise to me, was the release of Google Earth 4 Beta for Linux. I downloaded it last night and wasted a good hour or two “flying” around the world to various places. I then had the brilliant idea to save all the places I have lived during my life. Overall it seemed stable enough for me even though it is a beta (like most of Google’s products it seems). Unlike the previously released Picasa for Linux this seems to be made with Qt and does not rely on Wine. It also requires OpenGL so you will need a graphics card that can handle OpenGL.

Google also just released a new extension for Firefox, Google Browser Sync, that allows you to keep all your web browsers at various locations in sync. While not a full application, it is available for Linux. I downloaded it over the weekend and installed it on all of my machines. So far it has worked well for me, I like keeping all my bookmarks in sync. I was previously using another Firefox extension to do the same thing but it didn’t work nearly as good as Google’s. It only requires a Google account (Gmail, who doesn’t have that anymore?) which isn’t really a big deal.

Finally, as mentioned breifly above, Google has also released Picasa for Linux. Most of the controversy surrounding Picasa is due to the fact that it has been ported to Linux using Wine. You do not need to have wine installed and configured to be able to run Picasa on Linux. Many people have complained that because it uses Wine it is slow, I have not found this to be the case. I installed it on my P4 1.7 Ghz 1 Gig RAM Ubuntu 6.06 machine and it seems to load and work with my images faster than F-Spot and was very responsive. While not exactly a “native” port to Linux I welcome the addition to available Linux applications. Google contracted CodeWeavers to help getting this to work and as a result submitted 225 patches to Wine fixing bugs and adding missing functionality.

Regardless of what you think of Picasa for Linux the fact that Google took any time or effort at all to bring these applications to Linux is a significant step forward in validating Linux as a viable platform.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 13th, 2006 at 6:20 am and is filed under Linux. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site. Your comments will appear immediately, but I reserve the right to delete innapropriate comments.