Install Google Earth on Ubuntu 14.04

By Leo Gaggl

May 25, 2014

Trying to install Google Earth on Ubuntu. You could just download the .deb file and run dpkg command, however I prefer to use it via a repo to make sure upgrades are installed as part of the system upgrades.

http://www.google.com/earth/download/ge/

Google Keys

Note: this should not be necessary if you have use the GoogleTalk plugin or similar package from the Google DEB Repo

cd /tmp/ wget https://dl-ssl.google.com/linux/linux_signing_key.pub sudo apt-key add linux_signing_key.pub rm linux_signing_key.pub

Add Google Earth Repo

sudo vim /etc/apt/sources.list.d/google.list #add the following line deb http://dl.google.com/linux/earth/deb/ stable main

sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install google-earth-stable

NOTE: While this should be enough on 32bit versions of Ubuntu 14.04 unfortunately it turns out that there is a dependency problem with the 64bit version

Fix 64bit dependency issues

sudo apt-get install libc6:i386 lsb-core

The problem is even after the installation of the i368 libraries the .deb file from Google will still not install on 14.04 due to the missing dependency ia32-libs (which was removed). My solution was to download the 64bit .deb file from the link above and extract to a temporary folder and repackage on current system (without ia32-libs). If you find a more efficient way please let me know in the comments.

cd ~/tmp wget http://dl.google.com/dl/earth/client/current/google-earth-stable_current_amd64.deb mkdir google-earth-stable_current_amd64 mkdir google-earth-stable_current_amd64/DEBIAN dpkg-deb -x google-earth-stable_current_amd64.deb google-earth-stable_current_amd64/ dpkg-deb -e google-earth-stable_current_amd64.deb google-earth-stable_current_amd64/DEBIAN dpkg -b google-earth-stable_current_amd64 sudo dpkg -i google-earth-stable_current_amd64.deb rm -rf google-earth-stable_current_amd64*

You should now be able to run

google-earth