As indicated in my earlier post here, Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE) runs much faster than Ubuntu and any other version of Linux Mint. I really really like it. However, one thing had frustrated me for almost a week: I could not get Google Earth installed and run in LMDE.

Well, later on we found that Google Earth was indeed installed but it crashed immediately after being started. I literally tried all the installation methods I could find over the internet. I even sent the Google Earth crash report to Google. None helped me solve this problem. Then I saw someone on the Linux Mint forum mentioned about the 3D GLX Renderer issue – Google Earth needs a 3D video driver to display things properly. The command to see if the GLX Renderer is working is this command on the Linux terminal:

inxi -G

My output before Google Earth was working was this:

Graphics: Card ATI RS480 [Radeon Xpress 200G Series] X.Org 1.7.7 Res: 1360×768@60.0hz
GLX Renderer N/A GLX Version N/A

So this means that the GLX Renderer is not working at all. This is why I could not run Google Earth on LMDE and why it crashed right away after being started. THE SOLUTION?

Very simple… just use Synapitc to install a package called “libgl1-mesa-dri” – just that, nothing more! Remember to reboot your machine after installing “libgl1-mesa-dri”

If you have not installed Google Earth at all, install the “libgl1-mesa-dri” package first using Synaptic and then use the following commands to install Google Earth:

sudo apt-get install googleearth-package
sudo make-googleearth-package --force
ls (see see the exact filename for the .deb file created)
sudo dpkg -i --force-architecture googleearth_x.x.xxxx.xxxx.deb (use the exact filename)
googleearth (if you see it running, then success!)

Viola! Google Earth should run in LMDE without any problem 🙂