How to install Google Earth on CentOS 6 x86_64 (NVIDIA drivers)

published by mbaudier on Fri, 09/16/2011 - 14:36

A 64 bits RPM for Google Earth can be downloaded here, but getting it to work requires to install some more (32 bit!) dependencies.

When starting google-earth from the command line, you will get the following errors:
/usr/bin/google-earth: ./googleearth-bin: /lib/ld-lsb.so.3: bad ELF interpreter:
solved by
sudo yum install redhat-lsb.i686

Then
./googleearth-bin: error while loading shared libraries: libGL.so.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
solved by
sudo yum install mesa-libGL.i686 mesa-libGLU.i686

Then
Google Earth has caught signal 11.
This one is a real crash and was solved by installing nvidia-x11-drv-32bit.x86_64 from the ElRepo repository (http://elrepo.org) which is also providing the proprietary NVIDIA driver.
If you don't use the ElRepo or don't have an NVIDIA card, you should probably look for a 32bits version of your driver.

So, to sum up:
sudo yum install ~/Downloads/google-earth-stable_current_x86_64.rpm
sudo yum install redhat-lsb.i686 mesa-libGL.i686 mesa-libGLU.i686
sudo yum install nvidia-x11-drv-32bit.x86_64

Note: Google Earth installs and works flawlessly on CentOS 6 32 bits.