Google Earth v4 Released - Linux Support at Last

chrisd writes "We're very happy to announce that the a new version of Google Earth has been released. It features 3D textured buildings, some neat UI updates, better internationalization and, with this release, a native Linux version is available for download as well. The Google Earth team (with the help of Ryan Gordon) worked very hard to make this possible. Please see the Earth support site and check out the BBS for more information."

Thanks so much Google

[Anonymous Coward]

For finally making a Linux version. Downloading it right now...

Mac Sketchup (free)

[morcheeba]

Also today - Google's free version of Sketchup for the Mac is available: Download here [google.com]
More info on Sketchup [google.com] - it's basically a super-intuitive CAD program for quickly getting 3D ideas down on paper.

Check out the "Build 3D Models" Link!

[Rude Turnip]

Did anyone follow the link over there to Google SketchUp? I am amazed that this program hasn't gotten any publicity. Some details from the site:

"SketchUp is a simple but powerful tool for quickly and easily creating, viewing and modifying your 3D ideas.
* Click on a shape and push or pull it to create your desired 3D geometry.
* Experiment with color and texture directly on your model.
* Real-time shadow casting lets you see exactly where the sun falls as you model.
* Select from thousands of pre-drawn components to save time drawing.

And once you've built your models, you can place them in Google Earth, post them to the 3D Warehouse, or print hard copies. Google SketchUp is free for personal use. No registration is required."

NASA WorldWind also ready for Linux and MacOSX

[Lord Satri]

IF you go to this WindWindCentral page, you'll learn that Google Earth's open source competitor is readying Linux and Mac versions of NASA World Wind [worldwindcentral.com]. You can learn a lot about WW here [slashgeo.org] and a lot about GE here [slashgeo.org].

"NASA is currently making plans for World Wind 1.5 [worldwindcentral.com]. This version will be available for multiple platforms, including Windows, Linux and the Macintosh."

Re:Can someone please tell me..

[Jason1729]

If you never go outside, it can show you what the world looks like.

For the rest of us, take a GPS datalogger when boating, biking, driving, etc. Then import the data into Google Earth to have a satellite image with your trek pre-drawn on it.

Re:Thanks so much Google

[emeb2]

Has anyone actually tried it? A few observations:

* On the download page, there's no option to download the stable version 3 for Linux, even though system requirements are mentioned.

* So, I just downloaded & installed beta version 4 on my FC4 Athlon64 system and while it runs OK, the actual map data is all scrambled. As I zoom in/out it is constantly 'twinkling' with the wrong images. City names are dropping characters as well, so you can't even tell where you're looking when you get in close.

Nice try. Hope it works better in the future.

Re:Not at a better time...

[BiggyP]

Actually it can be done, i did it some time ago but the peculiar behaviour of the actual viewing portal and the toolbars made it pretty cumbersome, http://appdb.winehq.org/appview.php?versionId=3254 [winehq.org] had some tips.

Still, i'm very pleased that google have chosen to put the time and effort they have into their recent linux ports, this will be far more useful... ok, maybe just fun then, than picasa.

Re:Thanks so much Google

[Anonymous Coward]

If you note, the linux goes across both columns because of the simple size of the requirements.

Its a technical writer thing- the giant blob of unused space would have looked bad, so they used it.

There is no stable version of it- it is a beta release. They probably want you to report your system config to them so they can update it.

Yes it IS native.

[gukin]

When run "sudo GoogleEarth . . . " it creates a directory in /usr/local/google-earth. That directory is chock full of .so files, not .DLL files. Also Icculus (Ryan Gordon) is "not a big fan of wine". Ryan and most of the folks who hang their hats at icculus.org are former employees or had connections to Loki Software, a company that made NATIVE PORTS of games.

One other chap who worked at Loki then moved on to Epic Software and brought us NATIVE ports of UT2003 and UT2004.

It's definitely native.

Thanks to Gordon and I hope you had fun working with the folks at Google.

This is indeed a great day, google earth was the only app I ever used on my laptop under Windows.

Yeah, it's not perfect yet, read the forums, play around with it, tweek it and it'll go.

Re:Native?

[Dave2 Wickham]

It's using Qt:

dave@death:~/google-earth$ ldd googleearth-bin
[...]
        libqt-mt.so.3 => /usr/lib/libqt-mt.so.3 (0xb6dc2000)

That's just what "bare" Qt looks like. Ugly, isn't it?

(I COULD be wrong, of course, but icculus is a fairly major native Linux porter, so I'd doubt that he'd be working on a wine port.)

There's 4 versions of Google Earth

[Lord Satri]

Yes, you're missing something. But a lot of people are, believe me ;-)

There are 4 versions of Google Earth. Most people know about the free version only. The other Google Earth versions [google.com] gives you way more features, including GIS-like features [wikipedia.org].

Improved Aerial Photo Coverage

[qyiet]

Wow... the percentage of my country covered by the highres aerial photos has gone up massivly. This *really* adds to the usefulness of it. -Qyiet

Re:NASA WorldWind also ready for Linux and MacOSX

[TheBeansprout]

There is also a World WInd clone written by Pat Murris - WW2D Plus One [worldwindcentral.com] (homepage [alpix.com]) written in Java.

It's obviously quite simplistic however it is a 3D world viewer and can use the same imagery as World Wind, so it's a start and certainly something to use if you want to see the good-looking Next Generation Blue Marble imagery for one thing :)

More best-in-class apps for the Linux desktop

[j1mc]

Ok, so now we've got Ubuntu Dapper Drake 6.06 (among other excellent distros), FireFox, Thunderbird, and now Picasa and Google Earth. In the foreseeable future we'll have an OpenOffice suite that runs a little faster and we'll have a legitimate iTunes competitor, Songbird.

Things are looking up for the Linux desktop, and for best-in-class software that runs on it. It's an exciting time to be a Linux fan, no? :-)

Re:Thanks so much Google

[LiquidCoooled]

Swithc it to DirectX mode ;)

I found it cured all my running problems.

Crashes on startup

[obender]

./librender.so(_ZN12RenderWidget6setApiEPN5earth4e vll3APIE+0x4b) [0xf65177bb]
./librender.so(_ZN5earth6render12RenderWindow12cre ateWidgetEv+0x8a) [0xf64ff6ba]
./libgoogleearth.so(_ZN5earth6client12ModuleWidget 9showEventEP10QShowEvent+0x7d) [0xf78b180d]
./libqt-mt.so.3(_ZN7QWidget5eventEP6QEvent+0x277) [0xf6f8cdb7]
./libqt-mt.so.3(_ZN12QApplication14internalNotifyE P7QObjectP6QEvent+0xa1) [0xf6ee0731]
./libqt-mt.so.3(_ZN12QApplication6notifyEP7QObject P6QEvent+0xc9) [0xf6ee1219]
./libqt-mt.so.3(_ZN7QWidget4showEv+0x266) [0xf6f8bd16]
./libqt-mt.so.3(_ZN7QWidget12showChildrenEb+0x11b) [0xf6f8ba6b]
./libqt-mt.so.3(_ZN7QWidget4showEv+0x207) [0xf6f8bcb7]
./libqt-mt.so.3(_ZN7QWidget12showChildrenEb+0x11b) [0xf6f8ba6b]
./libqt-mt.so.3(_ZN7QWidget4showEv+0x207) [0xf6f8bcb7]
./libqt-mt.so.3(_ZN7QWidget12showChildrenEb+0x11b) [0xf6f8ba6b]
./libqt-mt.so.3(_ZN7QWidget4showEv+0x207) [0xf6f8bcb7]
./libqt-mt.so.3(_ZN7QWidget12showChildrenEb+0x11b) [0xf6f8ba6b]
./libqt-mt.so.3(_ZN7QWidget4showEv+0x207) [0xf6f8bcb7]
./libqt-mt.so.3(_ZN7QWidget12showChildrenEb+0x11b) [0xf6f8ba6b]
./libqt-mt.so.3(_ZN7QWidget4showEv+0x207) [0xf6f8bcb7]
./libqt-mt.so.3(_ZN7QWidget12showChildrenEb+0x11b) [0xf6f8ba6b]
./libqt-mt.so.3(_ZN7QWidget4showEv+0x207) [0xf6f8bcb7]
./libqt-mt.so.3(_ZN7QWidget12showChildrenEb+0x11b) [0xf6f8ba6b]
./libqt-mt.so.3(_ZN7QWidget4showEv+0x207) [0xf6f8bcb7]
./libqt-mt.so.3(_ZN11QMainWindow4showEv+0x93) [0xf705e513]
./libqt-mt.so.3(_ZN7QWidget10showNormalEv+0x33) [0xf6f85383]
./libgoogleearth.so(_ZN10MainWindow18readScreensiz eInfoEv+0x621) [0xf7876e61]
./libgoogleearth.so(_ZN5earth6client11Application3 runEiPPc+0x1569) [0xf789e2d9]
./libgoogleearth.so(_ZN5earth6client11ApplicationC 1EiPPcb+0x923) [0xf78a02c3]
./googleearth-bin [0x804c73d]
/lib32/libc.so.6(__libc_start_main+0xd2) [0xf6279ea2]
./googleearth-bin(__gxx_personality_v0+0x41) [0x804a961]

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 are now being written
to this text file:

.googleearth/crashlogs/crashlog-0B103505. txt

This bug report will be sent to Google automatically next time you run
Google Earth. Its data, which contains no personal information, will help
us correct problems without bothering you further. If you would rather
this info not be transmitted, please delete the above file before running
the program again. If you want bug reports to NEVER be sent, remove the
above 'crashlogs' directory's read/write permissions.

That isn't true.

[chrisd]

Earth is a native port (qt + opengl) Picasa uses wine.

Chris

Re:Yes it IS native.

[pherthyl]

Use a chroot environment for x86. Then it'll work. Some distros also ship with the required libs to run x86 binaries out of the box, so you might not even need that.

Re:Native?

[shutdown -p now]

This would mean you're not running it under KDE then. In this case, try running `qtconfig` first and play with the settings, you might be able to get a slightly better look.

Re:Native?

[Anonymous Coward]

This will work, but you need to also make sure to undo the LD_LIBRARY_PATH damage that the googleearth script does so that the system Qt is found.

Or, you can rename the libqt-mt and libqui.so in the googleearth directory. Do *not* remove these files: I have heard that the system Qt crashes Google Earth for some other KDE developers. On the other hand, qt-copy (from the KDE SVN repository, /branches/qt/3.3) appears to run Google Earth just fine.

Regards,
  - Michael Pyne

Re:Specifically

[Compholio]

I'm curious to see if Earth is native.

It is, I just downloaded it and it installs and runs beautifully without any Wine (even checked for them hiding it with ps).

A few observations

[owlstead]

Hi all,

- This seems to be a binary package only, which uses a few common libraries beneath it
- Installs without a hitch on my system, defaults to /usr/local/google-earth
- Runs very smooth in Ubuntu 6.06 AMD 64 bit with nvidia driver, but it seems to need root permissions to start (installed with sudo on the 'binary' installer)
- No real desktop integration yet (at least with Gnome)
- Asks to install symlink in /usr/local/bin, but does not say which command (googleearth)
- Probably not a good idea to run with nv driver in X, chech your /etc/X11/xorg.conf
- Comes with nice Icon that works in Gnome in root of installation folder

Oh, I got a rather new 3GHz AMD 64/1 Gig, budget (fanless) videocard and 6 Mbit download. Not top of the bill, but quite nice anyway, your experiences may differ.

Unfortunately, it does not seem to be open source. A bit of a shame, the real work is in the infrastructure and obtaining the maps anyway.

Yes it is native...

[nacs]

Yes it's native. Google Earth was originally coded using the QT(opia) library so no WINE stuff was needed.

I've installed it and it runs amazingly smooth and looks great.

Re:Specifically

[Directrix1]

It uses Qt. Gives it that nice cross-platform property. Additionally Picasa was ported to linux using wine-libs not necessarily wine the program itself. The Linux Picasa does have some native dependencies such as libgphoto for direct access to cameras, and it integrates into your notification area in Gnome (and I believe KDE also [untested for me]). Also, they committed over 200 patches [google.com] to the wine codebase which is great. Furtheremore, thank you Google!!! It works great on Gentoo with ATI 9600. I requested it a long time ago, and it was a long time coming but it works and looks great. googlegoodwill++

Re:What's the point?

[Rod, Hot]

Bear with me on this... it is a tad long, but worth it (I think at least).

OK, first things first. I am serving in the Army as an enlisted Military Policeman. Currently stationed at Fort Hood in the 1st Cavalry Division, I came back from a 1 year tour in Iraq in early/mid 2005. In Baghdad the military is using a "new" tool (that DARPA has been working on for a number of years) that easily allows collaborative efforts and battle tracking. (I just googled for it, and the name is out in the open with a nice description of it on defense-update.com ... so it _appears_ that I am not "talking out of school" here.)

Anyway, last year around April/May the Cav returns back to the states, we get a little down time, turn most of our trucks and tanks to be "Reset" (rebuilt/refurbished/updated) ... and catch a nice little breather when Katrina hits. The 82nd Airborne gets to New Orleans first (after the National Guard and reserves) and then the Cav.

Being an enlisted Military Policeman gave me a unique perspective to what was going on... and more importantly what was NOT going on. When I worked in Baghdad my job was to coordinate efforts between the Coalition Forces and the Iraqi Police. We tracked what the Iraqi Police were seeing on the Streets and what the military was seeing on the streets and tried to keep everybody on the same page.

Low and behold when I get to New Orleans I discover that I have the PERFECT skill set for this disaster. Military and Law Enforcement experience, VERY knowledgeable on how to push and pull information to and from everybody who needs it, dealing with ALL flavors of law enforcement and coordinating efforts on the fly.

One problem. I don't have a tool to put the coordination together. However, most places (hospitals, Police Stations, FBI, DEA, NYFD, Customs, and the FEMA coordination centers) all have Internet access. Guess what. We have the perfect tool... Google Earth.

Google had recently worked there ASSES off putting current and updated flood information into Google Earth, you could pull up where downed power lines and flooded roads were at, you could transpose the "pre flood" and the "post flood" images, and the downtown area even had 3D models of the buildings.

Oh, and IT WAS FREE... and easy to use... And you can EASILY share information between other people. I put an icon in my Google Earth .KML describing a dead body that needs to be picked up and the proper agencies (who are "subscribed" to my .KML) see that information in SECONDS (or minutes at the latest). There were a limited number of people there who could legally move bodies according to LA law so it was a constant effort to get them to where they needed to be.

You add a VOIP aspect to it and POOF! Instant command and control for the different agencies. It is nigh-impossible to crash google's servers and as long as you had power (which was rapidly becoming a NON issue) and Internet access (same thing) you were able to talk and coordinate your efforts.

The beauty of the system is that as long as each agency updates their little piece of the pie everybody can see and use that data... Even if they don't update it, there was so much overlap that someone would see and report an incident.

One other problem. We are dealing with the CIVILIAN government and FEMA here. They have a major case of "It wasn't grown here"-itis. Everybody I showed it to was amazed and astounded with how easy and efficient it was... and the power of collaboration was something completely new and foreign to almost EVERYBODY involved... except for the 1st Cav. FEMA seems hell bent to spend MILLIONS of dollars setting up a command and control center that only talked to itself... AMAZING. I showed their tech people and some higher ups what Google Earth could bring to the plate and they were impressed. The tech types were ready and willing to embrace the tool, but hesitant because t

Re:Thanks so much Google

[shellbeach]

* So, I just downloaded & installed beta version 4 on my FC4 Athlon64 system and while it runs OK, the actual map data is all scrambled. As I zoom in/out it is constantly 'twinkling' with the wrong images. City names are dropping characters as well, so you can't even tell where you're looking when you get in close.

Actually, mine's way more scrambled than that - initial display is all screwed, with redraws not erasing properly, on my fairly generic Dapper system (ATI Radeon card, open-source drivers). Pity - it actually runs very fast and smooth, but I can't make anything else out! Turning off the side-panels works better, but the image is still corrupted.

I can't quite work Google out here - are they following a "release-early/release-often" model? I mean, I know it's beta software, but this is Google's first release of a native linux app (Picasa with WINE doesn't really count) - surely they'd try and make it an impressive one?