This article is a run through of installing Google Earth to view points from a hike. At first, it was as easy as installing the Deb package, but then, I had a graphics issue that I had to work through. So, below you’ll find the error messages and the command that I used to fix the crash.
Google offers an official DEB package, so I just downloaded the file direcly from the Google Earth Website. I saw several articles that got fancy and used wget to download it. I just went to the website and clicked the download link.
Unfortunately, it crashed. When it ran from the terminal, this is the output that I saw:
$ google-earth 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/skp/.googleearth/crashlogs/crashlog-50ce950d.txt Please include this file if you submit a bug report to Google.
This is the debugging data from that file:
Major Version 7 Minor Version 0 Build Number 0001 Build Date Oct 29 2012 Build Time 19:13:39 OS Type 3 OS Major Version 3 OS Minor Version 5 OS Build Version 0 OS Patch Version 0 Crash Signal 11 Crash Time 1355715853 Up Time 1.17942 Stacktrace from glibc: ./libgoogleearth_free.so(+0x1e9cfb)[0xf758acfb] ./libgoogleearth_free.so(+0x1e9f43)[0xf758af43] [0xf7738400]
I did check to make sure that the lsb-core package was installed:
$ sudo apt-get install lsb-core [sudo] password for skp: Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done lsb-core is already the newest version. 0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
I read a couple of articles that suggested different things. One article suggested adding the user to a video group. Another one suggested editing ~/.config/Google/GoogleEarthPlus.conf and adding the “enableTips=false” setting. Unfortunately, none of those did the trick for me.
The Solution
The problem ended up being video acceleration. I have the Bumblebee driver installed and a discrete video card, so I just had to add the “optirun” command in front:
optirun google-earth
Now, this works fine if you are running Google Earth from the command line. The problem is that if you run it from the menu, it still crashes. So, I opened the Main Menu program, and I added the “optirun” to the launcher there.
Mapping my Trip
Really, what I wanted to do was take the points from our hiking trip and see them on the Google Map’s Satellite images. See, I told my kids and nieces that I would take them on this hike to see how close we could come to going over the mountain. I found an app for my phone that would track our hike: Backpacker GPS Trails Lite. I recorded a few key points including the spot where we had to turn around and go back. I wanted to see how close we were to getting over the mountain.
So, I read up on creating a KML file. Google’s KML Tutorial made an great place to start. Since Google Earth wouldn’t work at first, I found Chris Show’s “View your KML directly on a google map” website, and that did the trick. I could just paste the KML file into the Textbox, and I got what I needed!
Once, I got Google Earth working, I got a better 3D view of the mountian. I just did File > Open and chose my KML file.
Resources
- IT World: Install Google Earth 7 in Ubuntu 12.04 or 12.10
- Liberian Geek: Install Google Earth in Ubuntu 12.10 (Quantal Quetzal)
- Ask Ubuntu: How to install the latest version of google earth on ubuntu 12.10 64-bit?
- Gentoo Discussion Forums: googleearth signal 11 [SOLVED]
- Ubuntu Forums: Google earth crashes since installing 10.10