Good news! Tonight, I finally got around to testing running Picasa under Wine, and can confirm it works rather well for the main things it needs to do!
Which is a very good thing to tick off, as that means that as I can run that on Linux now, that's one fewer blocker to migrating over there anytime now🥳
The only annoying thing is that it will launch the "Wine Folder Explorer" window when exporting...
Notes:
* I could + and have just run Darktable for a while when stuck without access to my copy of the installer for this, but there are still a bunch of reasons I need to maintain access to a working copy of this
* I know that the old semi-official "Picasa for Linux" (that used to be available for Mint when I last used that distro over a decade ago for a few months) was based off Wine too. I can't remember if I ever used to run that fulltime on there, but IIRC it was a janky so I probably didn't. But in my tests today, it seemed to work well enough...
* Granted, I haven't tried getting QuickTime installed + running under this environment too (to get the video playback running too). That said, I don't currently have an easily accessible copy of its installer, so actually haven't been able to have videos showing up in my folder views on Windows for the past year either!)
Setup Instructions
Here's how I got it working. Obvious you'll need to have a copy of the installer handy (which I do, and have been copying around several places)
1) Getting the Installer onto Linux
I've had no end of trouble trying to get VM's to reliably mount the shared folders that VMWare says its available to them. Sometimes it works, other times it used to work then won't anymore one day / after some or other restart. Or maybe I looked in the wrong place or reinstalled something in the meantime. Anyway, long story short: I was forced to give up on one or two VM's.
What does work though is setting up ssh access, and using that to get things onto Linux!
1a) Setting up SSH Access
For Rocky, that was simply the following command (after confirming that OpenSSH was installed already out of the box, by doing "ssh"):
```
> sudo systemctl enable --now sshd
```
For Ubuntu / Kubuntu, that was a bit more troublesome, as it doesn't come with the SSH Daemon/Server package installed for "Desktop" machines by default. Thanks to a blog-post, I found I could do:
```
> sudo apt install openssh-server
> sudo systemctl enable --now sshd # <--- NOW that command works!
```
1b) Finding how to connect
To find your IP address for the VM in use, try one of the following:
i) Launch "System Monitor" (KDE one), and it should show this under "Network -> Wired -> IPv4"
ii) Run "ip addr show", then grab the ip-address that looks like "192.168.xxx.y" or similar (There should only really be two such values shown. One of those two will work when you try them)
Then back on Windows, bring up a terminal and try doing:
```
> ssh aligorith@192.168.xxx.y
```
Notes:
* Ensure you give it your Linux VM username, otherwise it will try to use your Windows one, and fail to connect
* Use your Linux VM account password
* IP address is as found above
1c) Doing the transfer
Just do the following from the folder with the installer:
```
> scp picasa39-setup.exe aligorith@192.168.xxx.y:
```
Basically, you're using "scp" to copy the "picasa39-setup.exe" installer file to the Linux VM's homedir.
Important: Remember to include that trailing comma, otherwise, who knows where that file got copied!
2) Setting Up Wine
On Ubuntu / Kubuntu, this is simply a matter of running
```
> sudo apt install wine
```
I had originally tried to do this on Rocky Linux too, but very quickly ran into a brick-wall there (i.e. apparently RHEL doesn't provide 32-bit libraries anymore, which means that the necessary Wine libraries needed for most of that ecosystem to run is NOT available from the normal package repositories, meaning you'll likely have to try recompiling the whole thing from source, though even their official docs don't make this immediately clear or easy to do)
On Manjaro, the following installs the base package:
```
> sudo pacman -S wine
```
HOWEVER, that one will then complain about needing to also install "wine-mono" packages. Clicking "Install" from the popup that appears though should fix that enough to get the installer running.
3) Installing via Wine
Run the following command, then follow instructions in the Wizard to install to default locations:
```
> wine picasa39-setup.exe
```
4) Usage from Wine
Once installed, you can launch it from the KDE Launcher under the "Wine" subsection (and can pin that launcher as a "Favourite" for easier access.
As for locating your files, from what I can tell, this is what happens:
* 1) Wine mounts everything under "~/.wine/"
* 2) Apps see the following:
* "c:/" - This is the mock Windows C-drive environment that the apps see. (i.e. "~/.wine/drive_c")
* "z:/" - This is the host Linux system's root folder, mounted as a drive presented to Wine
* Your Pictures, Documents, etc. "special folders" under $HOMEDIR get mounted to Wine as you'd expect (i.e. as if there was a user with your same Linux username)
* 3) The "~/.wine/dosbox" folder seems to contain a whole bunch of symlinks, which are used to maintain this illusion
Therefore, to launch the installed application from command-line, you can do:
```
> wine "/home/aligorith/.wine/drive_c/Program Files (x86)/Google/Picasa3/Picasa3.exe"
```
OR, even easier:
```
> wine "c:\program files (x86)\google\picasa3\picasa3.exe"
```
(Thanks to the following thread: https://askubuntu.com/questions/65487/invoke-a-wine-installed-application-from-command-line)
For ease of use though, you probably want to define something like this in a "~/.bash_aliases" file
```
alias picasa='wine "c:\program files (x86)\google\picasa3\picasa3.exe"'
```
(This was tested under Kubuntu - The default .bashrc file there looks for a "~/.bash_aliases" file that it will run if it finds one existing. Use `echo "My Aliases Loaded"` to check that this happens if in doubt)
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