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July 10, 2006

Google rawks my world

So I'm a Linux user. Big deal. As the years pass, more and more people are beginning to adopt Linux and make it their own. I've personally been responsible for converting several users over to the open source OS over the past 7 or 8 years. As it continues to grow and newer versions are released, more and more people show interest and the user base grows.

But the biggest hurdles are always the limitations of software. Getting Windows software to work in Linux can be a bit of a chore, even when using Wine. This is where Google steps in. Instead of re-writing their Google Earth and Google Picasa products specifically for Linux, they have worked with Codeweavers, the company that sponsors the Wine project, to specifically port their products using Wine. The result is quite remarkable.

I've had the Linux beta of Picasa 2 installed since its release a few months ago. I've been using it to manage all of my images on my home desktop. Tonight I was inclined to install Google Earth purely for the fact that I hadn't tried it yet. Below is the result of that installation...

Google Earth running on my Suse 10.1 desktop.
Click the image for a larger screenshot.

What I really love about Google is the fact that they're here to innovate, which it seems that a lot of software companies have forgotten to do these days. The best part of their project with Codeweavers ... all of the coding that they've paid for has been open sourced and turned right back into the Wine project. Talk about giving back to the community.

Keep up the good work, Google.

Update: I just noticed that for some reason that Google Earth didn't create a menu entry for Gnome. If you'd like a menu entry, you can download this file (right click and select "Save Link As" in Firefox). Once you have saved this file to your machine, copy it into your /usr/share/applications directory as root. This will put a shortcut to Google Earth under the following menu directory: Applications > Graphics > Viewer.

Please note that this file assumes that you have installed Google Earth as root using the default settings, which installs Google Earth in the /usr/local/google-earth directory on your computer.

~out...

Posted by ed at July 10, 2006 11:02 PM

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