How-To: Install Google Earth on Linux
Surprisingly, installing Google Earth to your Linux Desktop is relatively easy to do (same instructions apply to Macs). And once installed… a lot fun to use – especially its newest feature, Google Sky, for space exploration.
Instructions:
- Download Google Earth from http://earth.google.com/download-earth.html (you’ll be downloading a package called GoogleEarthLinux.bin)
- Fire up your Terminal and cd (aka change directory) to your Desktop (or whichever folder you downloaded the package to)
- From the command line type: sh GoogleEarthLinux.bin
Once you’ve completed all three steps, Google Earth will automatically install itself into a folder in your user directory called google-earth, which you have the option to change (see instructions below), and will create shortcut links on your desktop and in your home folder to launch the application. In case you don’t find the program useful, you can uninstall it by double-clicking the uninstall file in the google-earth directory.
[Advanced] Instructions for All User Access:
The instructions are the same as above except you need to use sudo (or root).
NOTE: For some reason Ubuntu 7.10 does not have a bin directory in /usr/local/ as recommended by the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard for placing executables, so you may have to create one before going on. The command for this would be: $ sudo mkdir bin
$ sudo sh GoogleEarthLinux.bin
Install Path: /usr/local/google-earth/
Binary Path (with Symbolic link checked): /usr/local/bin
* Now all users can launch Google Earth from Applications > Internet > Google Earth or simply by holding Alt+F2, typing googleearth, and then clicking Run.
* You may have noticed that when you use this method you get an odd file on your Desktop that appears to be a shortcut called Google-googleearth.desktop, but it doesn’t work. To make it work as it was intended, cd to your Desktop directory and manually change the file permissions to 644 and change the group and owner to your username.
$ sudo chmod 0644 Google-googleearth.desktop
$ sudo chown yourusername:yourusername Google-googleearth.desktop
* To uninstall Google Earth via this setup cd to /usr/local/google-earth and type $ sudo ./uninstall
Aside:
Also, checkout Google Earth Blog for all things Google Earth related (recommended by SkyandTelescope.com).
Popularity: 63% [?]
|
Comments
One Response to “How-To: Install Google Earth on Linux”
Leave a Reply
-
Meta
-
About
Alexander Grundner is a San Francisco Peninsula based web publisher who spends most of his time tracking down news stories for eHomeUprade, attending technology events, or working on his next big project.
For fun he likes to stay active outdoors, take photographs, shoot video, hack together PHP/Python code, play with Linux, and test new technologies.
I’m fairly new to the linux scene so it’s been a huge learning curve for me…..thank you for your
how-to-install google earth site…..I followed it as you instructed and it all worked great!!! thanks again….mike