UPDATE: See How to Install Google Earth in Ubuntu 10.04 for up-to-date instructions!
Google Earth puts the world’s geographic information at your fingertips. There’s a native Linux port of the latest version, Google Earth 5.
Here’s how you can easily install Google Earth on Ubuntu.
Install Google Earth
- Download and save the Google Earth installer for Linux.
- The file you downloaded should be called GoogleEarthLinux.bin. Find this file, right mouse click on it and select Open with Other Application.
- Click to expand the Use a custom command section of the Open With dialog. Type sh, and click Open.
- The Google Earth installer will decompress itself, and in a few seconds the Google Earth Setup window should open. The default options should be fine, so click Begin Install to continue.
- Once the installation is finished, click Quit to close the installer, and press return to close the terminal that the installer opened. Start Google Earth from the Applications->Internet->Google Earth menu.
Troubleshooting
If Google Earth opens, shows the splash screen, and then crashes, you’re probably experiencing a common issue. Running ~/google-earth/googleearth in a terminal will show this error:
./googleearth-bin: relocation error: /usr/lib/i686/cmov/libssl.so.0.9.8: symbol BIO_test_flags, version OPENSSL_0.9.8 not defined in file libcrypto.so.0.9.8 with link time reference
To fix this, browse to the folder you installed Google Earth into. By default this will be google-earth in your home folder. Find the file libcrypto.so.0.9.8 and rename it to something else, like libcrypto.so.0.9.8.bak. Google Earth should now start correctly. [related bug report]
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[...] See the original post: How-to Install Google Earth 5 on Ubuntu [...]
DUDE you are AMAZING I LOVE TOMBUNTU
[...] Update: Easier installation instructions are now available. See How-to Install Google Earth 5 on Ubuntu. [...]
yay now i can look at mars
*sigh* Nope, still crashes with a big ugly stack dump on AMD64 Ubuntu 8.10
Or:
$ sudo apt-get install googleearth-package
$ make-googleearth-package –force
Doubleclick on the resulting .deb file.
Great how-to, easy to follow.
I had to uninstall because Google Earth used up all my CPU’s & Memory.
To uninstall run the uninstall shell script located in the google-earth folder
Thank you, worked perfectly
[...] Google Earth puts the world’s geographic information at your fingertips. There’s a native Linux port of the latest version, Google Earth 5. More here [...]
[...] Read more at Tombuntu [...]
[...] Via | Tombuntu [...]
Worked great. Now I just need a fix for the missing letters bug on Intel graphics and all will be well.
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1087793
[...] Dryer: How-to Install Google Earth 5 on Ubuntu. The latest update for GE brings some really nice new features. Tom gives us a very quick and easy [...]
I have 8.10, amd-64, like Arcteryx. same exxperience for me. Renaming the lib stops it from crashing, by it doesn’t really load. I have 3GB RAM so memory shouldn’t be the issue. (It used to be on another machine, whien I first tried GoogleEarth, and that one failed in a very similar-looking way.)
Following Daniel Holbach’s comment: GE does come up and sort of work, but there are still a lot of issues. Blank or miscolored sectors on the globe, squares to the right (menus of some sort?) which are just multicolored pixels, only a few numbers appearing in the lat – long at the bottom.
I installed GE 5 on AMD64 Toshiba laptop. It works as well or better than GE 4 but there are some font issues. As far as the “Blank or miscolored sectors on the globe, squares to the right (menus of some sort?) which are just multicolored pixels, only a few numbers appearing in the lat – long at the bottom.”, I found that having any compiz effects at all produced those problems. turning off all desktop effects lets GE run perfectly (except the missing letters).
[...] kh?o : http://tombuntu.com/index.php/2009/03/20/how-to-install-google-earth-5-on-ubuntu/ Posted in [...]
Thank you for the tip about the library, I installed and work fine for a day but suddenly started to crash. I was going to downgrade to Google Earth 4 when I read this. Nice!
[...] Via | Tombuntu [...]
Thanks for the excellent write-up! Previously used Fedora but things spilled over in the end and so I recently changed to Ubuntu. I have since found your blog and am enjoying it to great extent. Keep up the good work dude! *hail*
Hi!
Thanks for the tutorial, everything worked perfectly. But I’m new to Ubuntu so I have no idea how to change the name of this libcrypto.so.0.9.8 file, Ubuntu tells me I have no permission to do that. What can I do?
Thanks,
Jantho
it worked, did a little mistake. thanks again!
i navigate to the libcrypto.so.0.9.8 file but am unable to rename it due to not being the owner. so how do i change permissions on this? sorry i am totally new…
You can start the file browser as root to rename the file if you’re not the owner. Open the Run Application dialog with Alt-F2 and run:
gksu nautilus
Hi there. Install is working but running the program is not working (graphics are very messed up and eventually the computer crashes). But never mind, i don’t need GE that badly. Now what i’d like to know is how to un-install it. Could you give me some hints? I know only how to go through add/remove but that won’t work for GE. Thanks. B.
Running the installer again should give you the option to uninstall.
Worked like a charm! Thanks, buddy!
Tim
Thanks worked great after I edited file name(be sure
and put a period on end of name)
thank you
After renaming libcrypto.so.0.9.8 googleearth sort of ran, just said “Warning: Unable to create prefs directory ‘/home/nick/.googleearth’. File exists.”, but it didn’t seem to be able to work out which window to make live or which to foreground nor did it ever finish redrawing any of them, really, just sat there and jittered. Totally unusable.
Is there any known cure for this or do I just dump this bugridden garbage?
See from above:
I installed GE 5 on AMD64 Toshiba laptop. It works as well or better than GE 4 but there are some font issues. As far as the “Blank or miscolored sectors on the globe, squares to the right (menus of some sort?) which are just multicolored pixels, only a few numbers appearing in the lat – long at the bottom.”, I found that enabling any desktop effects at all produced those problems. Turning off all desktop effects lets GE run perfectly (except the missing letters).
I got the existing prefs directory message too. I just renamed the existing one “.googleearth.old” and when I ran GE5 it generated the needed directory.
I’ve managed to install Earth on Ubuntu and renamed the libcrypto file, which fixed the problem of crashing.
Now the application will start, but it is running extremely shoddily – loading is very slow and the globe keeps disappearing to be replaced with outlines.
Any known reason for this?
Your instructions on how to install Google Earth were good
and worked for me. However, I did need to install a
multicast dns resolution program:
sudo apt-get install lib32nss-mdns
to get past a startup error when I did the installation on
Ubuntu 9.04 (AMD64). Thanks for posting the instructions.
Thank You; I finally DID get GoogleEarth 5.0 on my Ubuntu 9.04-system
Googleearth just crashes. At the command line it crashes so i don’t even get an error message.
would been a nice additon. unfortunately it does not work on ubunto 8.4
Cecil
Thanks for short explanation about how to install Google earth 5.0 on Ubuntu 9.04
I succesfully installed GE 5 on HP 6730 s laptop
“images overlay” doesn’t work well : images are vague
HELP
After typing “sh” and clicking open, the window simply says to hit “return” and nothing happens???
help?
Installation and working is ok. One thing is to change working directories in the conf file.The other thing is that the uninstaller provided did not work.
Great. This did not work. I went to help.ubunto.com and found a different guide there which installed a working google earth–now I have two installs of google earth. How do i remove the non working one?
Thanks for sharing this… turned out damn simple
but I noticed it’s running pretty slow in Ubuntu 9.04.
Unusual I guess…
Thanks anyways.
“images overlay” on my GE 5.0 doesn’t work well
help
yay! I liked the, right-click, open with ‘sh’ route…
However, instead of finding it in my Applications>Internet menu i have a googleearth launcher in /home/livindaylight
It launches and works, but would prefer to have it sitting properly in my Applications menu.
Any idea or suggestion to fix this?
Thank You
[...] How to install Google Earth on Ubuntu: http://tombuntu.com/index.php/2009/0…h-5-on-ubuntu/ [...]
In my case Google Earth starts loading (about half the Globe is displayed) but the system crashes after about 11 seconds. Although the computer does not re-boot, it goes back to the login screen, i.e. a logout is forced. Deletion of the file “libcrypto.so.0.9.8? has no effect; the crashes simply continue.
I am very new to Ubuntu and should like to get Google Earth running. Any assistance would be greatly appreciated.
Sorry – I neglected to provide information about my (fairly low-end) system. Here it is:
MS-6533E motherboard, 1.7GHz Celeron processor, 1GB RAM, Dual-boot with Windows XP on a 250 GB HDD and Ubuntu 8.04 LTS on a 30 GB HDD.
thnx, its working
HERE is the video tutorial for installing Google Earth 5 in Ubuntu
Thanks a lot Tom. your steps worked fine for me.
i’m using Ubuntu 4.08 (Hardy) 64-bit with Linux 2.6.24-24
have been wanting GE v5.0 for weeks & this was the only site that showed me how. =D
Thank you, but Google earth is very slow (LAG) and I mean very slow..
Any way to speed it up?
Very well written instructions, but the application run so slow that I had to uninstall it.
To fix the slowness issue you need to untick the Atmosphere option under the View menu. I guess it is a bug….
To speed it up go to view and uncheck atmosphere.
My installation went easy, and google earth runs, but the screen is flashing. It’s usable, but not perfect.
Sometimes the image goes blank, or flashes white on and off.
Any ideas?
Ubuntu 9.04, 4gigs ram, dual core 64 bit @2.5GhZ
[...] Re: What are the First things you do after installing Linux (any distro) Here is a howto to install google earth on Ubuntu. How-to Install Google Earth 5 on Ubuntu | Tombuntu [...]
thank you
When I install the package on Karmic Koala beta amd64 I get the following error, any advice will be welcome
Verifying archive integrity… All good.
Uncompressing Google Earth for GNU/Linux 5.1.3509.4636………………………………………………………
./setup.sh: 284: setup.data/bin/Linux/amd64/setup.gtk2: not found
./setup.sh: 299: setup.data/bin/Linux/amd64/setup.gtk: not found
The setup program seems to have failed on amd64
Fatal error, installer failed to run at all!
I am installing it now, but it is taking forever (more than an hour has elapsed). I am using 9.10 on an older PC (800mhz).
Thx
i have found a workaround for the glitchy graphics from various sites…
1. goto “view” and untick atmosphere and water surface
2. disable any desktop effects compiz etc
3. goto >tools>options>3d view>texture color (change to 16 bit)
4. >tools>view>options>3d view> graphics mode > (tick “on” safe mode)
RESTART GE5 ,and hopefully your good to go..
Thank you, perfect!!
I preferred to use the custom command
“gksudo sh”
rather than just “sh”. That way it installed as a proper application and is picked up in the menus.
Installed on Dell Inspiron 1300 with 9.10. Quick and easy installation. Worked first time. Many thanks.
It seems different Linux versions operate differently. The sh command worked for me, but I’m running Ubuntu 9.10 and believe it or not it’s a 64 bit version. They do have one.
I had to switch graphics drivers in System > Administration > Hardware Drivers, I believe. The recommended driver didn’t works so I had to use an earlier one. Odd thing, then the later one worked too. I guess it’s the old updating thing, as I updated from the third one listed and skipped the second.
Software Sources can get you more drivers, if you click the restricted options. In short, I do believe you can do most things from the Desktop or GUI without getting into too many elaborate commands in Terminal and even without using proprietory restricted files, though I’m sure that sometimes you have too. Ubuntu usually figures that for you too and puts them in Hardware Drivers. Also, the computer you have doesn’t usually matter, except for 16, 32, or 64 bit. Mostly it’s your operating system that someone needs to know in helping you, and your history, like what you’ve tried or if you are updating of a new install etc.
You can even increase the size of the Google fonts for File and Edit etc. in QT 4 settings in Administration. If you don’t have it, it’s good to have it, in my Ubuntu version, anyway. Maybe QT 3 has a similar visual interface. I think even apt-get and other commands have their visual interface. That’s neat.
Oh, well it’s best to start reading help from the beginning rather than jumping to step five, before 2, 3 and four, sometimes. That’s empowering also. Not bad for a three week user.
excellent! worked like a charm! thanks!
This really helped me but after the installation, when I to launch Google Earth I get the splash screen and then it goes away. I have tried launching in terminal and get the following error:
”
simon@simon-laptop:~$ ~/google-earth/googleearth
googleearth-bin: ../../src/xcb_io.c:542: _XRead: Assertion `dpy->xcb->reply_data != ((void *)0)’ failed.
Google Earth has caught signal 6.
We apologize for the inconvenience, but Google Earth has crashed.
This is a bug in the program, and should never happen under normal
circumstances. A bug report and debugging data have been written
to this text file:
/home/simon/.googleearth/crashlogs/crashlog-4b40f06d.txt
Please include this file if you submit a bug report will to Google.
”
The installation worked fine but I have no clue what to do now
Thank you in advance!
Thanx!! this worked just great after screwing around with it for the past 2 hours.
Tank you for this post! Very usefull. I’ve already solved all problems with Earth.
Tank you so mutch!
Thanks for your help…works perfectly. Great instuctions
Installed painlessly and didn’t encounter the bug you mentioned. Thanks.
perfect! ubuntu 9.10 gnome 64-bit
IF ONLY OTHER APPS WERE AS EASY AS THIS ONE TO INSTALL. FAB
thank you very much PERFECT
its fine to tell how to install google earth but were can one download it for linux. there seems to be no link anywere?????
HR
Worked perfectly, except the fonts looks crapy…
Thanks so much, so simple so precise
Great …fast and simple…
excellent job! thanks.
thank works,gracias funciona.
[...] having trouble, check out the Ubuntu Community Documentation on Google Earth. I’ve also written previously about installing Google Earth using the installer from Google. Enjoyed this post? [...]
you made me happy today
Thanx, my mom was always tellin’ me to “sh” and be quite.
Thanks there is great advice from this site.
I just downloaded Google Eath 5.2 for linux and the advice above did not work, and there was no libcrypto file. I took GE off and selected custom installation, choosing version 5.1.
It seems to work fine after I followed the steps above.
Great tips on installing Google Earth on Ubuntu. Works for me on Ubuntu 10.4
I have install the google earth and it crashes also, but the the problem notice is this:
(process:2074): GLib-GObject-CRITICAL **: /build/buildd/glib2.0-2.22.3/gobject/gtype.c:2458: initialization assertion failed, use IA__g_type_init() prior to this function
(process:2074): GLib-CRITICAL **: g_once_init_leave: assertion `initialization_value != 0′ failed
(process:2074): GLib-GObject-CRITICAL **: g_object_new: assertion `G_TYPE_IS_OBJECT (object_type)’ failed
Google Earth has caught signal 11.
We apologize for the inconvenience, but Google Earth has crashed.
This is a bug in the program, and should never happen under normal
circumstances. A bug report and debugging data have been written
to this text file:
/home/phila/.googleearth/crashlogs/crashlog-4c6b28cf.txt
Please include this file if you submit a bug report to Google.
Please, anyone could help solve this…. thanks!
It crashed. The terminal gave me this:
(process:2866): GLib-GObject-CRITICAL **: /build/buildd/glib2.0-2.24.1/gobject/gtype.c:2706: You forgot to call g_type_init()
(process:2866): GLib-CRITICAL **: g_once_init_leave: assertion ‘initialization_value != 0′ failed
(process:2866): GLib-CRITICAL **: g_object_new: assertion ‘G_TYPE_IS_OBJECT (object_type)’ failed
Google Earth has caught signal 11.
We apologize for the inconvenience, but Google Earth has crashed. This is a bug in the program, and should never happen under normal circumstances. a bug report and debugging data have been written to this text file:
/home/aperture/.googleearth/crashlogs/crashlog-4c72b495
Please include this file if you submit a bug report to Google.
What do i do to fix this…?
Signal 11 for me too, Kubuntu Lucid on AMD
Signal 11 for me too, 11/4/10, on Ubuntu 10.10. Anybody solve this yet?
I also had the problem described here
http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/earth/thread?tid=74174c59380ed82a&hl=en
when trying to install, and thank goodness for the instructions on this page we’re all commenting on.
This hasn’t been easy!
hi I installed it but when I open it the screen is black I can see the buttons and bars but I cant see the “earth” what can I do?
Fantasic help – so easy to understand and execute…but for a Linux newbie this is much appreciated. THANKS A MILLION!
Thanks A Lot TomUbuntu… That Really Helped… Thanks A Milliion…
I am running 10.10 but ge 5.2 does not want to install with sh. getting error “could not load setup.dat/setup.xml”
Any idea`s
I run the sh GoogleEarthLinux.bin command and get this
Verifying archive integrity… All good.
Uncompressing Google Earth for GNU/Linux 5.2.1.1588……………………………………………………..
setup.data/setup.xml:1: parser error : Document is empty
^
setup.data/setup.xml:1: parser error : Start tag expected, ‘<' not found
^
Couldn't load 'setup.data/setup.xml'
What should I do next? BTW I'm using Ubuntu 10.10 and Google Earth 5.
Thanks in advance.
Nope not work tried all instructions but did not load or install or any thing all i got was that the build was installed
[...] çal??acakm?? gibi yap?p aç?l?? logosunu gösterdi ama sonra çöktü. Sorunun çaresini http://tombuntu.com/index.php/2009/03/20/how-to-install-google-earth-5-on-ubuntu/ adresinde buldum. Google Earth’ün kurulu oldu?u klasörde (benim durumumda [...]