Install Google Earth in Ubuntu

Google Earth is a brilliant application and its available for Linux. Installation isn't as straight forward as in Windows but it's not that difficult to get it on your Linux machine. There are two ways of installing it, the first method involves downloading the binary package and then executing it and the second method uses the Medibuntu repository.

First Method

1. Download the Google Earth package for Linux from here.
   
2. Open the terminal and change directory to where the file is stored. If you saved it to the desktop, use:
   
   
   cd ~/Desktop


3. Change permission for installer so that you can run, use this command:
   
   
   chmod +x GoogleEarthLinux.bin


4. Finally, start the graphical installer.
   
   
   sudo ./GoogleEarthLinux.bin

You will be presented with the following window. From here on it's pretty straight forward.



Second Method

1. You need to add the Medibuntu repository, you can find out how to do that here. If your using Hardy Heron(8.04) then you can use this command to install the repository:
   
   
   sudo wget http://www.medibuntu.org/sources.list.d/hardy.list -O /etc/apt/sources.list.d/medibuntu.list


2. Add GPG key:
   
   
   sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install medibuntu-keyring && sudo apt-get update


3. Install:
   
   
   sudo apt-get install googleearth
   
   

Add Google Earth to Application Menu

Once you have installed it using either of the two methods, you can add it to the application menu for easy access.

1. Goto System>Preferences>Main Menu.
2. Choose the sub menu you want and press 'New Item', use the details shown below. The command is googleearth.

That's it. Enjoy.