Google Earth 5.0 goes under water

FEATURE RICH desktop imagery application Google Earth version 5.0 has been released.

Version 5.0 is still labeled beta software, which makes one wonder if Google will ever call it stable. It adds capabilities to view ocean floor and sea surface imagery as well as synthetic historical scenes of famous sites, and it includes some upgrades to its armchair world touring features.

The free Google Earth offers satellite, ground based and astronomical imagery covering the entire planet and night sky complete with multi-layered maps, terrain and three-dimensional building views and a wealth of geo-location specific information.

The company also offers a Pro version, priced at $400, that has additional tools to support research, presentation and collaboration. Google makes custom databases available for enterprise applications.

Self-installing Google Earth 5.0 packages can be downloaded that work on Mac OS/X, Linux and Windows.

We clicked on the download button to automagically acquire the Linux version, marked the binary file as executable by running chmod a+x GoogleEarth.bin as root, and then ran the installer, watching as it unpacked and installed itself in /usr/local/google-earth and added its desktop menu entry.

Trying it out for the first time by entering googleearth in a root shell, it failed to run, with the error "./googleearth-bin: symbol lookup error: /usr/lib/libssl.so.0.9.8: undefined symbol: EVP_camellia_128_cbc".

However, a moment's searching found a workaround to fix the problem. The cryptography library packaged with Google Earth 5.0 isn't compatible with those installed in some Linux distributions, including SuSE, the Mandriva we use here, and likely others.

But issuing just two commands in a root shell solved the problem:

cd /usr/local/google-earth
mv ./libcrypto.so.0.9.8 ./libcrypto.so.0.9.8.bak

Now it runs fine. µ

L'Inq
Google Earth