It’s taken a year, but Google Earth finally went Linux.
The installer is pretty neat – you don’t need root, and everything goes into one folder with all dependencies, so it’s easy to deinstall. It worked acceptably on my crappy asus laptop too, which was a big surprise.
When I stuck it on my desktop, I got warnings that performance would stink because I had no hardware OpenGL (judging by the number of questions on ubuntu-users, I’m not the only one).
I have an Nvidia card, I just never needed 3D before (shows how lazy I’ve got, I used to regularly handbuild DRI support into FreeBSD4). So thought I’d enable DRI:
$ sudo apt-get install nvidia-glx
$ # needs linux-image-386 instead of the 686 image
$ # (hyperthreaded p4, but haven't noticed a performance hit)
$ sudo nvidia-xconfig
$ # tweaks your Xorg.conf (makes a backup, don't worry)
$ sudo rebootWhen X next starts, I get an Nvidia logo and the desktop is a whole lot snappier.
More to the point, Google Earth now flies (and xscreensaver does’nt intermittently DOS the box any more)
Still no Sketchup for Linux, so I can’t build Isengard in my garden yet. Bah.