Skip to main content

Oooh wine!

I installed Picasa on my Ubuntu box today. It uses wine! For those who don't know what wine is, 'wine is not a (windows) emulator' for Linux. I used to hate wine. I had tried to run Kazaa way back in the day to get things off the internet and believe me, I got it to work, but with many hours of painful configuration. Linux has come a LONG way since then. I ran a ps --forest and viola

fatherted 8569 1 3 16:12 ? 00:00:11 /opt/picasa/wine/bin/../lib/../bin/wineserver
fatherted 8721 1 0 16:12 ? 00:00:00 c:\windows\system32\explorer.exe /desktop
fatherted 8959 1 0 16:12 ? 00:00:01 PicasaMediaDetector
fatherted 9198 1 71 16:12 ? 00:03:18 c:\Program Files\Picasa2\Picasa2.exe
It runs everything in wine. And I didn't have to do anything to get it to work. Now that is progress. Folks, seriously, for those of you who have whined and complained about how user unfriendly Linux is, give Ubuntu a spin. It won't do everything your Windows XP machine does... but it sure will wow you. Comparing this to Redhat 7 (the first Linux distro I dared to install on my desktop), this is a whole other world. Use Wubi and try it out. You might just convert.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How to make a good thing go bad quickly in tech

I haven't written a work related post in what seems like ages. I am currently living through the aftermath of a third M&A in my career. The company I currently work for is in its third incarnation - from a small tech startup 15 or so years ago to something that was sold to a large software company - one of those lumbering giants that have their hands in all kinds of technology driven fields - where they invested sufficiently in it to grow it in its current location - to now finally being acquired by an even larger technology company - one that its hands in all kinds of technology fields.I came along post the second phase but I have seen 2 other US tech company acquisitions, one that made me quit fast and the other that took me around the world but made me leave anyway. The difference from the previous take-over of the current place and this one is stark. While there was a lot of churn up top in the previous acquisition and differences in what you paid for benefits etc, for...
Post a Comment
Read more

Happy Birthday Canada

I have celebrated more than 20 Canada Days in Canada. While this nation is far from perfect and we have so much further to go, there is hope. We are a nation, at 153, looking at the future with a mixed record: we have immense prosperity, peace, safety and a relatively good standard of living for most . We are welcoming to immigrants, refugees and guarantee people with a wide range of rights. We are a leader in respecting people's human rights and punch above our weight internationally. We are also a country that is in the midst of a reckoning right now. We have systemic racism, we are at war with the environment - we are actively digging things out of the ground to sell to the rest of the world. Climate change is ravaging our country - we have floods, fires and drought.  Our past and present deeds towards indigenous people is shameful. We have a long way to go yet, but there is hope. In the midst of a pandemic, with social upheaval to correct past wrongs, or at least make amen...
Post a Comment
Read more

Summers are getting hotter in Vancouver

This shouldn't be a shock to anyone, but summers are getting a lot hotter here than it has been since I started living here. It used to be that in summer, it would be in low to mid 20s and reliably sunny between mid June to about mid August. Perhaps the sunshine stayed till September. Somewhere along the way, there would be rain as well. But that was 2+ decades ago.  In the past few years, there has been many days where wildfire smoke dominated the skies and air. Rain is rarity now in the summer. And it has started to get hot. It is not unusual for days when the highs are over 30C.  This is starting to cause homes to get very hot. Most apartment buildings in Vancouver are covered in glass. While it makes for great views, it also turns apartments into little ovens. My apartment faces West and it regularly goes over 30C by the end of the day. And it barely cools down overnight. The outside is a lot cooler in the evenings. A few years ago, we had something called a heat dome - ba...
Post a Comment
Read more