Picasa 3 for Linux

Linux.com has a video tour of Picasa 3 for Linux.

Google's open source blog

Google just released a new blog to promote their open source activities on code.google.com. Read it at google-opensource.blogspot.com.

Google Desktop beta for Linux

Just after three years of the initial launch of Google Desktop there is a Linux beta version launched. Packages for Debian/Ubuntu and Red Hat/Suse/Mandriva are available.

Google Earth beta 4

The new beta4 of Google Earth for Linux seems to be really good. Especially since I also upgraded to new X.org drivers after the new release of Ubuntu.

What still buggers me with Google Earth is the missing North Pole.

The Google Group coup

Aha! They are starting Mac-discussions in a Google Group now! I am not lagging far behind. So now there's a brand new Google Group for Linux-discussions. Just in case.

Google Firefox Extensions

I have now installed Google Firefox Extensions on my Firefox 1.5. It has been working as expected for over 10 minutes now. The first thing I did was turn off all the privacy intrusion stuff. But I had to try the PageRank meter, because that was what I was really interested in. I guess it has its' privacy issues as well.

Interestingly enough, the Firefox extension can replace the ordinary Firefox search box. I did not try that.

Although this Firefox extension is not in any way coded for the Linux platform, but for the Firefox as a platform, it should work just fine where you run your Firefox. By the way, this plugin was kind enough to offer me to blog "this page" directly to my blogger.com-account.

Now, where can I find more Google applications for Linux?

Applications for Linux

Google has published a few applications for Linux. I have tried two of them on my Ubuntu installation, but did not continue to use them. They were far too much bugs for serious use.

The applications were Google Earth and Picasa. Both of them are built on Wine, a free implementation of the Windows API for unix. I know that Google has put a lot of effort in providing patches for Wine in order to make the applications work. But I would love to see native applications from Google.

Google and Linux

I just noticed that Google has a brand new Mac blog, with all things concerning Mac and Google. So ... where is their official Linux blog?