Installing picasa 3.9 on ubuntu

I thought it would be as easy as “sudo apt-get install …” but it wasn’t.  To my surprise I found that Google has officially stopped supporting Picasa 3.9 on Linux.  Of course you can use version 3.8 and it would work just fine however if you don’t want to miss on all the new features of 3.9. here is the trick:

• sudo apt-get install wine winetricks
• wget http://dl.google.com/picasa/picasa39-setup.exe
• wine picasa39-setup.exe

So far so good. It installed fine and I could open picasa and import images.  But then when I tried to login into my google account, it came up with a blank window — with no form controls to login into my a/c.

Further investigations suggested that I needed to install IE6 for the form to work correctly. But if you use the default configurations of winetricks, the installation of IE6 fails.  So here is the trick that worked for me.

• Obtain ie60.exe by visiting the following URL. Wait here for a couple of seconds and the browser should start downloading ie60.exe file.

http://www.oldversion.com/download.php?version=%2Fdownload-Internet-Explorer-6.0-%28Full-Installer%29.html

• Once downloaded, put it on your local webserver such that, it is downloadable from http://localhost/ie/ie60.exe

• Copy the file ie60.exe inside ~/.cache/winetricks/ie6
• Edit line 7350 in /usr/bin/winetricks

<< w_download http://browsers-us.mirrors.zensoft.net/ie/win32/6.0/ie60.exe 8e483db28ff01a7cabd39147ab6c59753ea1f533

>> w_download http://localhost/ie/ie60.exe 8e483db28ff01a7cabd39147ab6c59753ea1f533

• WINEARCH=win32 WINEPREFIX=~/.wine sh /usr/bin/winetricks -q ie6
• restart picasa

Done!