Morning, everybody.
Some of you, no doubt like me, enjoy exploring the planet with Google Earth. You've probably also noticed that Phil Broughton, Xenialpup's developer hasn't, as yet, produced a package for Xenial.....32-bit
or 64-bit.
I believe this is because Google are no longer distributing the 'Free' package, as such, but are instead now distributing the 'Pro' package for free instead. I d/l'd the 32-bit package of this earlier on this morning, packaged it up, and tried it out. I don't know whether Phil's had a look at this, and discovered what I did (if he's even had time to do so..!); it starts, but doesn't render properly, and a lot of the pop-up window features 'stick' and 'freeze' in place, and refuse to budge. Also, the only bit of the main window that can be seen is a 2" x 2" square up in the top-left corner. Which
ain't a lot of good.....
(Of course, this could be entirely down to my onboard graphics.....the elderly ATI Radeon Xpress200 chip. It still works very well (even though it's nearly 13 yrs old!), and gives a beautiful, crisp picture.....but it won't let me view the new
web version of Google Earth in the Chrome browser. (Seems it's not 'WebGL'-capable.....)
Oh, well; you can't win 'em all. I'm not complaining; at 13 yrs old, according to most folks, she's well past her 'sell-by' date.....but she still runs sweetly. Which I attribute to Pup's modest demands this last few years...
-----------------------------------------------------------------
So. I tried Phil's original package of 7.1.2 he'd put together for Tahrpup, but it wouldn't start. Okay, I thought; let's see if we can find a somewhat newer version of the 'free' package. I've spent hours tracking down one lead after another, but, as expected, those sites that are offering these are invariably doing so for Windows. And Google, it appears (just like with Chrome), don't archive their older versions. They want you to always use the newest version.
In a GoogleProductGroups blog post that I found, they give their reasoning as follows:-
"
As for your question about why we don't let users use any version they want, let me explain a bit about how Google Earth works. Unlike a typical application, Google Earth combines both client-side (the code that lives on your computer) and server-side (stuff running on our computers in the cloud) code. These two pieces need to work together in harmony. We also are constantly evolving and improving Google Earth - both in the quality and magnitude of the data, as well as the introduction of new features like historical imagery. Evolving the product often means making changes that require changes to both the client-side and server-side code. So as we do this, it becomes difficult and sometimes impossible to support older client software. So as we design new features and improve the product, we do so in a way that allow recent versions of Google Earth to continue to work, while sunsetting older versions after a reasonable period of time (1-2 yrs.)"
Fair enough, I thought. So, I unpacked Phil's Tahrpup package to see why it wasn't working. Turned out to be quite a simple 'fix'. The
ld-lsb.so.3 sym-link in /lib (linked to
ld-linux.so.2 in the same directory) appeared to be broken. So I've recreated the sym-link & packaged it up here in Xenial, and it now works as it should. This could of course be because ld-linux.so.2 in the original wasn't linked to Xenial's
libc-2.23, but instead to Trusty's
libc-2.19...
If what Google say about 'sunsetting' older versions holds true, I wouldn't like to say how long this will continue to last. This version came out 4 years ago, in 2013.....and I've got packages of version 5.xx.xx.xx (from around 2011) that appear to still be working fine in the Slackos. Let's hope it keeps chugging along for a while yet..!
Anyway; here's a link to 7.1.2, fixed, and re-packed, for 32-bit Xenial, at my MediaFire a/c:-
http://www.mediafire.com/file/cckfzr...enial-1386.sfs
(I would have re-packed the Tahr64 package for 64-bit Xenial, but I'm not running that one; I tried an install, but it proved somewhat 'problematic', and simply wasn't behaving itself on my hardware.....*sigh*)
Enjoy.
Mike.