January 24, 2012

Google Earth on Fedora 16

Forget all of this. This now works cleanly under Fedora 30.

I have a fresh install of Fedora 16, and find myself wishing I could run Google Earth. When I go to the google earth website, I find I can download RPM packages of either an i386 or a x86_64 version of Google Earth 6. When I try to install the x86_64 package I get:

rpm -Uvh google-earth-stable_current_x86_64.rpm 
error: Failed dependencies:
	lsb >= 3.2 is needed by google-earth-stable-6.1.0.5001-0.x86_64
So, I do yum install lsb, and get the following packages.
================================================================================
 Package                 Arch         Version               Repository     Size
================================================================================
Installing:
 redhat-lsb              x86_64       4.0-7.1.fc16          updates        25 k
Installing for dependencies:
 pax                     x86_64       3.4-12.fc16           fedora         69 k
 perl-Class-ISA          noarch       0.36-1005.fc16        fedora        8.3 k
 perl-Locale-Codes       noarch       3.20-1.fc16           updates       308 k

Transaction Summary
================================================================================
Install       4 Packages
After this, I can install the google-earth package, and it puts an executable into /usr/bin/google-earth and spits out the message:
Redirecting to /bin/systemctl  start atd.service
However, when I try to run it I get:
/usr/bin/google-earth: ./googleearth-bin: /lib/ld-lsb.so.3: bad ELF interpreter: No such file or directory
The thing to do (apparently) is to install the 32 bit lsb packages. And maybe you could figure this out by the fact that lib64 is not mentioned in the "file not found" message mentioned above, but ultimately the google team needs to get the RPM package dependencies set up properly.
So, give the command: yum install redhat-lsb.i686

which on my machine pulls in:
======================================================================================================================================================================
 Package                                  Arch                               Version                                      Repository                             Size
======================================================================================================================================================================
Installing:
 redhat-lsb                               i686                               4.0-7.1.fc16                                 updates                                25 k
Installing for dependencies:
 cracklib                                 i686                               2.8.18-2.fc15                                fedora                                 71 k
 db4                                      i686                               4.8.30-3.fc15                                fedora                                615 k
 pam                                      i686                               1.1.5-1.fc16                                 updates                               650 k

Transaction Summary
======================================================================================================================================================================
Install       4 Packages

After this google earth seems to start up just fine.

But it locks up my machine

The first time I tryed to run it, it ran for perhaps 30 seconds, then locked up my machine. I did several zooms, which it seemed to be handling properly, then no response. Then I discovered that though I could move the mouse around, nothing was responding. Not just google earth either, I could not switch desktops, nothing seemed to be responding to mouse or keyboard events. I was able to use another machine on the network, ping my machine, and log in via ssh. I then killed several google earth processes, but that did no good whatsoever. I finally got impatient and rebooted my machine. Without the network access I would have had to resort to the reset button.

After the reboot, I nervously restarted google earth again, and used Help and About to get the following information:

Google Earth version 6.1.0.5001 built 10-17-2011
Rendering via OpenGL and using the nouveau driver
Then when I use File-->Exit, I got the following along with a long traceback:
(/u1/tom) cholla $ google-earth
*** glibc detected *** ./googleearth-bin: munmap_chunk(): invalid pointer: 0xf76
I am tempted to change to the nvidia driver, but that is much more work than I want to deal with right now - and it is not clear that will yield any benefit (i.e. I am not sure that will get google earth running).
Have any comments? Questions? Drop me a line!

Adventures in Computing / [email protected]