Outstanding Bear Grylls Photo Gallery
I have been writing about Bear Grylls for over a year, and thought I knew everywhere to look for news and information about him.
Therefore I was surprised, when researching my previous post, to discover another resource.
I learned that Bear Grylls has an outstanding photo gallery on Google’s British Picasa Web at:
http://picasaweb.google.co.uk/beargryllsphotos
Picasa and Picasa Web
Picasa Web is a free service, which provides one gigabyte of public, or private, photo storage, to anyone with a Google account. It was originally designed to work with Picasa software, which can be freely downloaded from Google.
Basically, you just install Picasa, and it creates a searchable catalog, of all the images on your computer. Then select photos, and click once, to upload to Gmail or Picasa Web.
My favorite feature was collage which Google describes as:
“Select a group of pictures, choose one of the beautiful templates, and Picasa will create a collage that expands your creative horizons.”
When I still had Windows, I used to use collage to make “instant greeting cards” by selecting a few photos, and setting it to print on half a page. Fold the paper in half, and Voila! you have a blank card. The same process can also be used to make a screensaver.
Unfortunately, Google does not offer a native Linux version. Linux users must install WINE, a Windows emulator, to use Picasa, which seems silly to me, because my Linux system never crashes, and I want to keep it that way.
Getting Started
Google only recommends Picasa for use with Microsoft Windows. Be sure to check out known issues before downloading Picasa, or signing up for Picasa Web.
Incidentally, my tests with Firefox 2 and User Agent Switcher showed that Picasa Web does not work with Opera either.
Comments
You don’t have to install Wine to run Picasa for Linux.
Installing Picasa does not affect the stability of one’s Linux system.
Hi Dan,
Google
says:said:I also found a link to a 2006 patch from you on
http://code.google.com/opensource/wine.html where it says: download the exact Wine source tarball used for Picasa 2.7.3736 (10 MB)
When did this change?
FWIW I tried WINE several years ago, when Corel released a Linux version of PhotoPaint (9?). At that time PP used WINE, but I kept disabling it, because it caused something (cannot remember what now) to crash repeatedly.
I had several years experience with PP, and did not want to have to learn GIMP. Frankly, I would still rather be using PP, for my limited image editing needs, than Gimp.
Which leaves me with two questions:
Would love to have IE and PP available. I currently use Browsershots to check Web pages in IE.
Thanks, Mitch
Picasa uses Wine internally. i.e. when you install Picasa for Linux, it
installs an isolated copy of Wine in /opt/picasa. It is only used for
Picasa, doesn’t affect anything else. That’s why the user doesn’t have
to install Wine or even know that Picasa is based on Wine.
I think Corel apps followed a similar strategy, bundling an internal
copy of Wine. But that was over eight years ago, and Wine has improved
substantially since then. It can run Photoshop CS2 very well, for instance.
About the two apps you mentioned (IE and PP): IE6 works in Wine, and
only if you install it using ies4linux (http://www.tatanka.com.br).
PP seems to be bundled with Corel Draw, so can see how well various versions of
PP work in wine by visiting the Corel Draw entry in the Wine AppDB:
http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=application&iId=440
It looks like PP9 might work but other versions don’t install under Wine.
Which version of PhotoPaint do you have?
I am embarrassed to say, that I cannot find my program CDs, but I think I have versions 5 through 8. Just moved and they are buried in a box somewhere, with other Windows stuff.
However, found notes for CD 7, and it works perfectly, except:
Copy/Paste doesn’t work without native ole32.dll see bug #3611
Now, I am interested in trying it. I used PP extensively from mid 80’s to late 90’s.
I once spent a week estimating the time to scan/convert images from large catalog for Web site. Then a month doing job with PP. Scarily, I am still doing same graphics tasks I did ten years ago.
Thank you for also leading me to:
http://www.tatanka.com.br/ies4linux/page/Installation:Suse which explains how to install IE6 on SLED 10
That led me to a Novell explanation, which lead me to: http://webexpose.org/2007/01/07/internet-explorer-7-on-linux/ which explains how to install IE7 too. Wonder if Novell links to it because of Microsoft deal/WGA.
Anyway, I don’t know why I never thought of this, but this will save me more time than PP.
Thanks again,
Mitch
I really liked the way they came off