Thanks! I purged all the nvidia packages from Sid and installed the driver from testing as well as the nvidia-glx-ia32 package. Tried launching GoogleEarth and got the message telling I had no libGL.so.1 on my system (again). So I followed a link in Spanish suggesting to download libGL.so.1 from a launchpad link and copy it to /opt/google/earth/free. I did so, and the program now works with some glitches, but at least it's usable.

Regards.

You should be able to use the driver from Sid, I only use the ia32 packages from testing and everything appears to work.

Copying some random version of a file is not a very good solution. Have you tried installing libgl1-mesa-glx:i386? From this link (http://packages.debian.org/search?su...rds=libGL.so.1) it appears that libGL.so.1 is found in this package.

Alright, I'll upgrade the driver to the one in Sid's repos then. Thanks for the suggestion.


You're right, I don't like to download random files from the net either. I tried some packages containing libGL.so.1 some days ago, but I don't remember if I tried libgl1-mesa-glx:i386. I'll try it when I get home and let you know how it goes. Thanks for your help.

You shouldn't need to manually download any files. Adding testing to your sources.list enables using testing packages from apt-get.

Hi again,

Sorry for the late reply, I've had a busy week and I haven't had the time to tinker with this. I'll try when I have some time and post back.

Thanks for your help folks, it's really appreciated.

A recent dist-upgrade has broken 32 bit support again -- this time the nvidia-related packages.
So, no more Google Earth or Second Life for me for a year or so unless I move to Xubuntu :(.

Well, after some tinkering I finally solved the problem installing libgl1-nvidia-glx:i386. It removed libgl1-nvidia-alternatives-ia32, libgl1-nvidia-glx-ia32 and nvidia-glx-ia32, but solved all the problems I was having with GoogleEarth. Have you tried installing it?

There was an issue with one of the 32 bit packages and it wouldn't install - it has been solved now so all is well again.

Thanks to Odiseo
 

Thanks Odiseo! That has solved my problem as well. I also had to place a link into the google earth folder:

Good, glad it worked for you!

Oops, meant to say it's working again (it was solved a couple of days after my last post to this thread and I thought I'd posted but looks like I didn't). I've not been brave enough to try but Google Earth may now even work in Sid without the Testing libraries.

Note to self: "Running apt-get dist-upgrade then blindly hitting 'y' <enter> is not a good idea."
Broken again by my stupidity. A few times a dist-upgrade has wanted to remove google-earth but I've said "no" and waited and things have been solved so hopefully it'll be the same this time.
All this because Google can't package a 64 bit version and Sid doesn't seem to have multi-arch working yet.
I wonder whether other distros are going through this?

FWIW, I applied my daily upgrades about one hour ago and didn't have any issues, so probably they fixed whatever was causing the removal of Google Earth (on the Debian repos side). Maybe doing a dist-upgrade after refreshing the list of packages, followed by a Google Earth reinstall will fix it for you? (In case you haven't fixed it already).

Thanks, I dist-upgraded a few hours ago ans saw nothing so thought it wasn't yet sorted. However, I just dist-upgraded again to be sure (and just got a bash update) and was able to install ia32-libs and ia32-libs-gtk (which I hadn't noticed was missing also) without having to use "-t testing" and reinstall google-earth.
So, now to investigate whether I still need the testing repos at all. Or, perhaps, ia32-libs has been removed from Sid entirely now so apt has to grab it from testing.

Edit: Wasn't thinking there, sorry, I think the issue was that one of the dependencies of ia32-libs (libsqlite[something], I think) wasn't present until some point today. So, obviously, my dist-upgrade wouldn't show anything related to the problem since this package had been removed.