Uwe Hermann - Google Earth for Linux - Beta - Comments

It does. It uses Wine; go

Anonymous — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 14:32:57 +0100

It does. It uses Wine; go into the options dialog and turn on a setting that requires restarting. It alerts you, and the icon is a Win 2k / 9x series icon...

solution for me was...

Anonymous — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 22:29:21 +0200

I just ran into the same problem with an ATI X300 card on Slackware and have it resolved.

Go as far as seeing the splash screen of a GoogleEarth install.

Go to ATI's website and download the older ATI driver for linux, I used
ati-driver-installer-8.27.10-x86.run

run it, using a command like:
sh ./ati-driver-installer-8.27.10-x86.run --extract ati

this will create an ati directory with all the files from the driver package.
You might want to back-up your GE files before doing the following.
Copy one file from the driver package over the top of one of the GE drivers:
cp ati/arch/x86/usr/X11R6/lib/libGL.so.1.2 /opt/google-earth/libGLU.so.1

Now run GE - should work normally... now to install the missing fonts.

ATI and Google Earth

Uwe Hermann — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 05:31:41 +0200

Nope, sorry, no idea. As always with closed-source software (both ATI drivers and Google Earth) you're at the mercy of the vendor. Good luck!

Uwe.

possible problem with ATI card

deloptes — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 00:16:37 +0200

As I wrote above I can not run Google Earth on my Fujitsu-Siemens notebook with an ATI graphic card inside. I use the latest ATI proprietary driver with a 2.6.20 kernel on debian etch and it works very well ... amazing quality (for the price).
I can run Google Earth on an Dell Notebook with SuSe with Intell card inside with the same kernel ...

Have you any ideas?

Have you read somewhere something

thanks in advance and best regards

debian package

deloptes — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 00:07:55 +0200

On debian there is a package that you can use to build your own package and install it with dpkg -i afterwords.
But what for, when you can do it with the GoogleEarth.bin install. I think it is an overhead.

Unfortunately I have another problem. I can not start GoogleEarth on my fujitsu notebook It hangs on initialisation ... I use debian etch here.
On my company notebook wich has intel graphic card and SuSe GoogleEartch installs and runs without a problem

I think it is because of the ATI card but no confirmation yet ... if you have any ideas let me know

GeForce 6100

Nishant — Mon, 30 Apr 2007 18:06:50 +0200

I have similar problem with GeForce 6100 card. I am running Debian Etch with Debian's default kernel (2.6.18) and binary driver (1.0.8776).

Globe is not rendering properly (missing tiles). Not all tiles displayed on zoom too.

Wrong

What Is — Sun, 22 Oct 2006 18:36:11 +0200

Not only are you wrong about Google Earth being wine based (it is not), you are also wrong about wine being an emulator (it is not). Furthermore, programs run in wine are not slower than they are on Windows. On my dual-boot box, ListPro rins faster in wine on Linux than on Windows. Same for PowerPoint Viewer.

Nice when Microsoft software runs better on Linux than on Windows, no?

GeForce 6200

henk — Mon, 31 Jul 2006 20:19:21 +0200

same problem,
Suse 10.0, with nvidia drivers for Geforce 6200
runs tuxracer just fine
but google earth is slow

I have the same problem.

merlin — Sat, 01 Jul 2006 22:39:14 +0200

I have the same problem. GeForce6200 TC, and incorrectly placed textures, using any drivers newer than legacy 71.74. What is interesting, similiar problems with rendering also appear in some windows game that I run through cedega - GTA: Vice City and Diablo II. Newer games like NFS: MW and FIFA06 also have this issues. Graphic problems doesn't seem to exist when playing native linux games (like Enemy Territory and its mod: True Combat: Elite). Are nVidia drivers a bit messy?

Wine?

Uwe Hermann — Sat, 24 Jun 2006 19:03:52 +0200

Um, no. I don't think Google Earth uses Wine, it's a native port. Picasa does, though.

Google Earth for linux

r|z — Sat, 24 Jun 2006 18:32:09 +0200

The reason many people are having problems is because google earth for linux is actually just a google earth for windows that uses wine technology to run on linux. so if you are having problems with the app then you could go see www.winehq.com they have a pretty good faq page. The reason it is so slow is it uses indirect rendering, and thinks that it is running on windows, the wine layer just emulates the windows environment, and like many emulators performance is always lost

Yep, I have a "GeForce Go

Uwe Hermann — Tue, 20 Jun 2006 11:22:32 +0200

Yep, I have a "GeForce Go 6200 TurboCache (rev a1)", too. I looked through the forums but couldn't find any working solution, yet. I played with my xorg.conf file a bit, but no luck there, either.

Google is aware of this, I think, it'll probably be fixed in the next release (I hope)...

Re: Rendering Problems with Google Earth

Anonymous — Tue, 20 Jun 2006 10:07:35 +0200

You wrote:

> It appears as though certain NVidia cards have the problem (GeForce
> 6200 TurboCache(TM)

This is exactly the card in my machine. And I have exactly that problems with rendering.

Just call my to lazy to read and/or research via Google, but are there any ideas or advises, how to clear this problem?? I surfed a lot to find powerful information such like this descreptions in this blog, so it would be very great, if there would be any suggestions or links to possible solutions too.

I am running testing

David Zuccaro — Sun, 18 Jun 2006 01:16:02 +0200

I am running testing (etch).

btw, there does seem to be a debian package at this site but the link is broken. You might need to email him.

http://orasul.trei.ro/

The Right Thing (tm)

Uwe Hermann — Sat, 17 Jun 2006 08:19:11 +0200

Well, depends on what you think the Right Thing is...

You cannot install Google Earth via apt-get, there's no such package (AFAIK). So running GoogleEarthLinux.bin is correct.

Hm, really strange, I have ttf-bitstream-vera, too, but it doesn't help... Are you running Debian unstable, stable, or testing?

If you want to use the proprietary NVIDIA drivers, you have to recompile them each time you recompile your kernel, yes (if you have a custom kernel).

If you use the Debian kernels, I think you can use some NVIDIA installer packages from Debian, but I never tried those...

HTH, Uwe.

Google Earth for Linux - Beta

Uwe Hermann — Tue, 13 Jun 2006 17:45:43 +0200

OK, so Goole has finally released a first version of Google Earth for Linux (beta, of course).

Well, maybe this time they really mean it when they say "beta"...

Here's some quick observations:

Of course, it's not open source, you basically get a bunch of *.so files and an executable.
It uses a bunch of open source software packages, though, e.g. libcurl, OpenSSL, libjpeg, libPNG, libtiff, libmng, zlib, Expat XML Parser, FreeImage, and a bunch of other things. All the licenses of those projects are contained in a README, though.
The installer seems to be (based on) the Loki installer, at least a ~/.loki directory is created with some stuff in it.
The maps cache, and some other files are stored in ~/.googleearth.
The ~/.googleearth/crashlogs directory contains log files which are generated when the application crashes, and sent to Google upon the next restart of the application automatically. The README says that you should basically chmod 000 ~/.googleearth/crashlogs if you don't want that. They say these files don't contain personal information. I haven't seen one yet (didn't crash, yet), so I cannot tell if that's true.
The EULA says that Google Earth will phone home (they call it "check for available updates to the Software"), and that you automatically agree to that when you use it: "By installing the Software, you agree to automatically request and receive Updates".
When I start Google Earth, I get a popup window which tells me to install Bitstream Vera Sans fonts or things might look strange. No idea which fonts extactly they mean, I've got the Debian packages ttf-bitstream-vera, and ttf-dejavu, but the warning still appears.
After Google Earth connects to the server(s) I get to see something resembling a globe, but not really what I (or Google possibly) expected. There's simply no textures for anything, I just see (broken) wireframes (see screenshot), but that's about it.

I'll have to play around with it a bit more, maybe it's an issue with the NVIDIA drivers or something. But as I don't have the source I can basically just make stupid guesses...

(via Golem, and a bunch of other sites)