Recently I blogged about “What Do You Do Post-Install?” to find out what little tweaks everyone applies to their systems on a fresh machine. It appears that a lot of you enable the Medibuntu repository right away and take advantage of that for media and codecs. Did you know there are also other applications available, like Google Earth?
This post is an update to a previous article I wrote, this time specific to Ubuntu 8.10 “Intrepid Ibex”.
Configure the Medibuntu Repository
As mentioned above, the first thing that you’ll need to configure is the addition of the Medibuntu repositories. Setting up this third-party repository can be done by way of a few quick commands:
sudo wget http://www.medibuntu.org/sources.list.d/intrepid.list -O /etc/apt/sources.list.d/medibuntu.list
sudo aptitude update && sudo aptitude install medibuntu-keyring && sudo aptitude update
This will add the Medibuntu repository, import the Medibuntu GPG key and make the new packages available.
Install Google Earth
To then install Google Earth simply use:
sudo aptitude install googleearth-4.3
You should now have Google Earth added to your “Applications > Internet” menu and, assuming your video card supports the requirements, you’re ready to virtually travel the planet!
Depending on your video card you may want to disable the atmospheric rendering, which can greatly increase performance. This can be done by unchecking the following setting:
View > Atmosphere
If, for some reason, Google Earth doesn’t load properly or crashes on your machine you could try to revert to an older version which seems to have less issues. To do that remove the 4.3 version and try the 4.2:
sudo aptitude remove googleearth-4.3 && sudo aptitude install googleearth-4.2