Recently I blogged about installing Adobe Acrobat reader by way of the Medibuntu repository. This got me thinking about some of the other great (albeit non-free) software that is available there. Here I’ll review how to add the Medibuntu repository and then how to install Google Earth!
Configure the Medibuntu Repository
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/hardy.list -O /etc/apt/sources.list.d/medibuntu.list
--> sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install medibuntu-keyring && sudo apt-get 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 apt-get install googleearth-4.3
You should now have Google Earth added to your “Applications” menu and, assuming your video card supports the requirements, you’re ready to virtually travel the planet!
One thing that I did find which helped greatly regarding performance was disabling the atmosphere rendering. This can be done via:
View > Atmosphere : uncheck
If, for some reason, Google Earth doesn’t load properly or crashes on your machine you could try to revert to an older package version which seems to have less issues. To do that use:
sudo apt-get install googleearth-4.2
