Tips on installing Picasa Linux 2.7 on Linux

Recently, I attempted to install Picasa 2.7 for Linux for a friend. Even though google’s installation instructions were fairly simple, I encountered a lot of problems starting it. Here’s are some tips on avoiding the problems I encountered

Do not start Picasa as root or sudo

Picasa has to be installed as root, but you should never start Picasa as root or do sudo picasa. When you run Picasa, it writes a .picasa directory in your home directory. If you run it as root or use sudo (which cause Picasa to run as root), the .picasa directory will be owned by root. As a result, when you try to run Picasa as yourself, you will be unable to write to it. Do a ls -la in your home directory. If .picasa is not owned by you, your Picasa configuration is messed up. To correct, delete the .picassa directory and run again or change the owner of the .picasa and its subdirectory to you.

Be patient the first time you run it

The first time I ran Picasa, it launched with the Picasa cursor. After a while, the cursor disappear, but I cannot see any Picasa, so I tried running it again and also try to kill off the rogue Picasa processes. It turns out that it takes a really long time to start up the first time. The first time you start Picasa, it will attempt to create Wine directories, this apparently takes a long time depending on the speed and memory of your machine.

So the first time you run Picasa, take a walk around the neighborhood and get a cup of coffee. By the time you get back, you should see the screen prompting you with the Picasa agreement.

Picasa is ultra-slow in a Virtualbox

PIcasa is almost unusable in a Virtualbox emulator linux guest (it may work better in Vmware, but I haven’t tested this) There is a several second lag when you click on a menu and the cpu is loaded by 30%. It’s possible that it’s slow because it has to read files off a virtual disk, or may be it needs hardware graphics acceleration. Do not bother running Picasa in a Linux guest.