Introducing the First Official Launch of Cooliris for Linux

Hi guys,

I’m Dima, and I joined Cooliris four months ago after working at Google for a year. I’ve always thought that Cooliris was a great program, but was disappointed that I couldn’t actually use it on my own Linux machine.  This got me motivated to do a side project to enable Cooliris for Linux, even though I’m technically a backend engineer.

Now, after a fun three months of wrangling with Linux and working hard to make Cooliris perform on as many distributions as possible, we now have a  Linux version of Cooliris that is shipping with our 1.10 release! Try it here and let me know what you think.  You can learn more about system requirements at the bottom of this post.

It was a fun challenge to make it work reliably on every possible distribution, with every video card, every window manager, and so on. Quite a few times, I’ve had to rely entirely on users’ feedback because I did not have the same hardware and could not reproduce the problems that users ran into. Working around Linux bugs was a challenge, too: even though they were not Cooliris bugs, I still had to find a way around since blaming Linux wouldn’t be very helpful, and we wanted everyone to have a great experience.

Here are some system requirements:

• A recent Linux distribution.
  • Ubuntu 8.04, Fedora 10, OpenSuse 11 should work.
• Hardware-accelerated graphics. Without hardware acceleration, Cooliris should still run, but will be unusably slow.
  • NVidia cards with proprietary drivers (version 173 and above) have been tested and function well
  • ATI cards have been tested and work with the latest fglrx driver
  • Intel integrated cards function but with issues
  • To test hardware acceleration, run “glxgears” in full screen and see if it runs smoothly
• Firefox 3
• Flash 10 or higher. If you’re using a 64-bit Linux, we recommend that you install a pre-release version of 64-bit Flash.

See the support page for more information about specifications and support.