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Installing Google Earth on Linux (Xubuntu 6.06)

Google Earth is finally available for Linux — nice. Here’s how to install:

wget http://dl.google.com/earth/client/current/GoogleEarthLinux.bin

You’ll see the download progress. When it’s finished, make it executable and run it:

chmod 744 GoogleEarthLinux.bin
./GoogleEarthLinux.bin

This asks you to agree to the License Agreement, then to confirm the installation directory. I changed this to /home/mpromber/bin/, and then removed the “create symbolic link” option that offered to create a symlink in that directory. It seems I should have added a “google-earth” to the install path above (now I have all the Google Earth files floating around in ~/bin), oh well (then leave the symlink option checked). Works nicely. Creates a desktop icon, or else just say:

googleearth

Addendum: So I changed my mind about the install directory and wanted to reinstall — turns out Google Earth is very easy to get rid of. Go into the install directory and

./uninstall

This entry was posted on Friday, June 1st, 2007 at 16:31 and is filed under Linux, Noobs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

3 Responses to “Installing Google Earth on Linux (Xubuntu 6.06)”

  1. Ron Says:
    October 28th, 2007 at 04:21

    tried the above and it did install but won’t run. I got this message at end of install.
    ……………………………..
    Installing mimetypes…
    Installing desktop menu entries…
    touch: cannot touch `/home/ron/.config/menus/applications-merged/xdg-desktop-menu-dummy.menu’: Permission denied
    Installing desktop icon…
    Google Earth has caught signal 11.

    Don’t know what it means.

  2. Marianne Says:
    October 28th, 2007 at 11:16

    Hi Ron,

    touch: cannot touch `/home/ron/.config/menus/applications-merged/xdg-desktop-menu-dummy.menu': Permission denied

    Looks like the Google Earth installer had a problem writing a file it wanted to write. I don’t remember whether I ran it as root, and I have since removed Google Earth (since I hardly ever used it).

    This may or may not cause your problem of not being able to run Google Earth.

    Maybe uninstall and then install again using sudo, if that doesn’t do the trick, try starting from the commandline (googleearth) and look for specific error messages there.

  3. Ron Says:
    October 28th, 2007 at 17:30

    thanks I’ll give it a try

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