Google-Earth 5 Beta in Ubuntu Hardy on EeePC 901

This proved to be a little more difficult than I had anticipated but it’s working fine now. Here’s what I did. First though, I found that I had to remove the existing Google-earth package although I’m not sure if this was totally necessary:

1. Download GoogleEarthLinux from here

2. Make this bin file executable with (from the download directory)

chmod a+x GoogleEarthLinux.bin

3. Run the installer with

sudo ./GoogleEarthLinux.bin

4. This should go to completion without problems but it still won’t launch without crashing. So to fix this, cd to the install directory (/opt/google-earth) and

sudo mv libcrypto.so.0.9.8 libcrypto.so.0.9.8.old

See this thread for more details.

5. Now it should start fine (launch it from a terminal with “googleearth”. However, for Google-earth to run well, I found I had to make sure everything else (browser, AWN) was shutdown.