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Wednesday, May 23, 2012

Running Google Earth on Fedora 17 x86_64

Today I've filed a bug report for an error trying to update redhat-lsb package (link). As a result of the latest changes, I had to uninstall "redhat-lsb.i686" package from my system.

Then I identified the cause for having this package installed in the first place. Trying to run Google Earth resulted in the message:

/usr/bin/google-earth: ./googleearth-bin: /lib/ld-lsb.so.3: bad ELF interpreter: No such file or directory

This package I had installed earlier in order to enable Google Earth to run on a 64-bit system. This was done following the advice in article Google Earth in 64-bit Linux (Fedora, Ubuntu).

Now, after installing latest lsb packages it was not possible anymore to install redhat-lsb.i686 package on Fedora 17 x86_64. Fortunately, I found an old bug report that also contains an extremely convenient workaround - LSB symbolic link (/lib/ld-lsb.so.3) is missing in x86_64 version redhat-lsb package.

Simply creating a symbolic link in /lib with

ln -s ld-linux.so.2 ld-lsb.so.3

will enable 32-bit applications to use the library and, in result, Google Earth will run without any problems on a 64-bit system.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Well, on a new and clean install of Fedora 17, you need to run
yum install redhat-lsb.i686 redhat-lsb-graphics.i686

and than google earth runs without a problem.
Setting up a link as you stated yields just a broken link on a fresh system...

Alen's Australia said...

Thanks for the info. redhat-lsb has been fixed recently. I've actually submitted a bug for this issue.
Cheers

Anonymous said...

I did that but got:

[root@localhost lib]# ln -s ld-linux.so.2 ld-lsb.so.3
[root@localhost lib]# google-earth
./googleearth-bin: error while loading shared libraries: libfontconfig.so.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

Alen's Australia said...

You might not need to do the linking. redhat-lsb package has been fixed so it is possible to install it and Earth should work without the link.

Alen's Australia said...

Also, try

yum whatprovides libfontconfig.so.1

to see which package is missing. It looks like fontconfig-2.8.0-7.fc17.i686, in my case.