Google Earth on Fedora

Installing Google Earth in Fedora is trickier than it should. Here is a short HOWTO:

• Download 64bits Fedora version from Google Earth site
• sudo yum install google-earth-stable_current_x86_64.rpm
• OOOPS!!! You got file /usr/bin from install of google-earth-stable-7.1.2.2041-0.x86_64 conflicts with file from package filesystem-3.2-28.fc21.x86_64

rpm has an error, we need to fix it. We'll rebuild the rpm fixing the error with rpmrebuild

• sudo yum install rpmrebuild
• rpmrebuild -ep google-earth-stable_current_x86_64.rpm
• A text editor with the spec file (rpm configuration file) is opened, you need to delete the line %dir %attr(0755, root, root) "/usr/bin"
• rpmrebuild will ask for confirmation and inform about the path of the generated rpm, just install it
• sudo yum localinstall ~/rpmbuild/RPMS/x86_64/google-earth-stable-7.1.2.2041-0.x86_64.rpm

Now, the application is succesfully installed, but sometimes crashes when started. It looks like the best to it is to install the 32 bits verion, or Google Earth 6 (latest is 7 at the time of writing this post). Unless you need any specific feature from version 7 I recommend installing version 6 rather than the 32 bits version of 7. The latter requires many dependencies, and it's still buggy on Fedora.

More info:

• https://code.google.com/p/earth-issues/issues/detail?id=1525