Linux Rocks - google earth question

[timadam]

I installed Ubuntu last week and I am seriously impressed. Microsoft
has obviously been left in the dust. The last time I used any command
line stuff was DOS. bash is sooo much better, I can not say enough.
I only wish I had made the switch before now. I guess I am preaching
to the quire . . .
anyway, I was wondering if any one has had much luck with google earth
on a dell notebook under Ubuntu. When I tried, I had a little display
issue (everything went all modern art on me). Got any good links that
might help me?

[chutsu]

Could you elaborate more on the modern art bit? Do you mean by images
flickering? How?
Remember, its rather hard to understand the problem when you just say
"modern art" cause I consider the output of any command line programs
a form of "modern art" (saves me a bus journey to the national gallery
- just joking) :)

On Dec 21, 5:47 pm, timadam <gort.klaatu.barata.ni...@gmail.com>
wrote:

[tuxsun1]

lol @ chutsu You're lousy for the Art Museum business.

[timadam]

I just meant that it might be worth hanging on my wall if I didn't
need my monitor for other things. I used synaptic on Ubuntu 9.10
release. when I was done with the install process I rebooted my
system when my display turned to graphic noise, random blocks of
pixels in random patterns (that is the best way I can describe it
without getting a picture of it). I removed the google earth install
and all was well on the next reboot. I am figuring it is a graphics
setting that needs tweaking but I am a little (ok, a lot) in the dark
as to where to start to look for info. Ive a 3 year old dell
notebook, Any directions or helpful links? Much appreciation.

[Shaun Marolf]

On Mon, 2009-12-21 at 23:22 -0800, timadam wrote:
> I just meant that it might be worth hanging on my wall if I didn't
> need my monitor for other things. I used synaptic on Ubuntu 9.10
> release. when I was done with the install process I rebooted my
> system when my display turned to graphic noise, random blocks of
> pixels in random patterns (that is the best way I can describe it
> without getting a picture of it). I removed the google earth install
> and all was well on the next reboot. I am figuring it is a graphics
> setting that needs tweaking but I am a little (ok, a lot) in the dark
> as to where to start to look for info. Ive a 3 year old dell
> notebook, Any directions or helpful links? Much appreciation.

In Control Center click on Hardware Drivers. You may need to use the
proprietary drivers versus the Open Source ones to get the desired
display control you need for Google Earth. Without knowing what your
video controller is I would say start there first.

--Shaun

[thejaguar]

I've found Google Earth to be a little hit-and-miss with certain
combinations of distribution and video card/drivers. Although I
haven't seen it turn the video wonky until after it was started...
Were you installing a pre-built .deb for Synaptic package, or did you
download the .bin directly from Google and follow the instructions to
build your own package? (which can be fraught with perils itself, but
may generate a usable package for your system). Sometimes it's a
matter of it trying to use a particular library that isn't a good
match for your distribution and googling for it reveals that someone
out there has figured out that you need to do something like ln -s /
usr/lib64/myvideo.lib /opt/google-earth/drivers or something (that was
just a random example, don't try it! :-> )

One final tip - if you get it working but it's slower than a 286, turn
off Atmosphere.

On Dec 21, 9:47 am, timadam <gort.klaatu.barata.ni...@gmail.com>
wrote: