| Want to know more about a specific location |
| Sunday, 08 January 2006 | |
|
Google Earth was created to put satellite imagery and other geographic information right on the (Windows) desktop. Unfortunately no Linux version is available jet. In the meantime the Linux Community was trying to get Google Earth running on a Linux Desktop using Wine. This Tutorial will explain how to install and run it. To be honest, it is very easy to install and to run it, but you have to live with some deficiencies:
You have to disable menus (using Ctrl+1 and Ctrl+2). It is possible to use the menus on the top, if you know where they are. The fonts are crazy. It seems that they are too far apart for the status bar and map labels. So I recommend disabling the status bar as well. Nevertheless, if you have no Windows machine around you and would like to display and view satellite imagery but also to handle and process it in other Linux application, this is the way how to do it. Step 1: Getting the software To get the whole thing running we need the following software:
Download the above mentioned software and store it in the user’s home directory. In this workshop I stored everything in /home/frank. Step 2: Suse 10.0 Installation I don’t want to explain how to install Suse. It is very easy theses days. If you need help, please use the following link: http://www.linux.org/dist/reviews/suse10.html It is now time to specify which programs you wish to install on your system. There are thousands of packages available for SUSE Linux, and to make it simpler to manage the packages have been placed into groups of similar applications. We just need a basis system. Save time and hard disk space and just install the necessary files. Please make sure to install Microsoft True Type Fonts. Remark: You will later have the possibility to add and remove software packages using YAST. Step 3: Installing Wine According to WineHQ Webpage: “Wine is a translation layer (a program loader) capable of running Windows applications on Linux and other POSIX compatible operating systems. Windows programs running in Wine act as native programs would, running without the performance or memory usage penalties of an emulator, with a similar look and feel to other applications on your desktop”. You downloaded already the latest version (wine-0.9.5) in Step 1. It is now time to install it with root permissions like this: su rpm –i wine-0.9.5-SuSELinux100.i586.rpm Next we have to configure Wine to simulate a Windows 98 system. To do so, please go back to a normal user (in our case frank) and run winecfg from the user’s home directory. Wine will create all necessary subdirectories for you. cd /home/frank winecfg Again, do not forget to set the Windows Version to Windows 98 like this: Step 4: Install all necessary dll and exe files Just unzip the fille psapi.zip you downloaded in step 1 and copy the dll to the windows system32 directory like this: cd /home/frank unzip psapi.zip cp psapi.dll /home/frank/.wine/drive_c/windows/system32 Next we have to install dcom98.exe like this: cd /home/frank WINEDLLOVERRIDES=”ole32,oleaut32,rpcrt4=n” wine dcom98.exe Wine will ask you to install DCOM98 for Windows 98. Answer with yes like shown below: Finally it is necessary to run winecfg again to prepare the GoggleEarth installation and to set the Windows Version to Windows XP. cd /home/frank winecfg Step 5: Installing and run GoogleEarth This will be already the last step in our workshop. Just run the following commands from the console similar to what we did in step 4. WINEDLLOVERRIDES="ole32,oleaut32,rpcrt4=n" wine GoogleEarth.exe Please watch the installation process. The setup will create GoogleEarth in the following directory: /home/frank/.wine/drive_c/Programme/Google/Google\ Earth or /home/frank/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/Google/Google\ Earth Finally you can run GoogleEarth.exe with the following command: WINEDLLOVERRIDES="ole32,usp10,msvcrt=n" wine /home/frank/.wine/drive_c/Programme/Google/Google\ Earth/GoogleEarth.exe If you have any problems with the installation, you’ll find all related posts here: http://appdb.winehq.org/appview.php?versionId=3254 Please download the pdf version of the article here.
|