ATI 8.40.4 driver and Googleearth

[Larry Hartman]

On Tuesday 14 August 2007 04:22:42 pm kubadmin wrote:
> Larry,
>
> I installed the new driver and everything seems ok, speed is much better
> (I'm getting 2095 fps with an ATI Radeon 9600 Pro) but, and this is a BIG
> "but", GoogleEarth no longer works.
> It worked fine with the 8.3x.x versions of the driver. I've even
> uninstalled the 8.40.4 driver according to ATI's instructions and
> re-installed it the wiky way but the problem remains.
> Do you have any hints of what I might try?
> GoogleEarth is probably the only app I really need a functional ATI driver
> for. It didn't work with open drivers or the fglrx driver distributed with
> kubuntu until you came out with your wiki and now I'm back to stake zero.

Antonio:

I can confirm your frustration and I too have a broken Googleearth.  I 
stumbled across what is likely the problem while looking at the Synaptic 
package manager description for Googleearth.  I pasted the issue at the 
bottom, but highly recommend not following the instructions to fix the 
issue....as the fix seems to make a bad problem worse.

What I do recommend is that you reinstall the previous driver and reinstall 
Googleearth afterwards.  Whenever I download the latest fglrx driver I always 
hold on to the last working version until I know the latest appears to work.  

The wiki still has the last version listed, so I will leave it up for a day or 
two yet....and now that I know about this issue I will post it on the wiki 
when I edit it for the latest version.  As far as the wiki goes, I did not 
start it, nor do I own it, but I do update it as a part of the 
community--seems as though I get to downloading the drivers quicker than 
others.

I will probably continue using latest fglrx driver and wait until Googleearth 
issues get resolved.  Not a pressing program for me at the moment.


Larry

===========================

googleearth for Ubuntu
----------------------

If you have an ATI graphic card using the proprietary driver (fglrx),
googleearth may freeze at splashscreen[0].

Here is a possible workaround[1][2]:
$ cd /usr/lib/googleearth/
$ sudo wget http://librarian.launchpad.net/7037027/libGL.so.1 -O libGL.so.1

It will replace the shipped libGL.so.1 with a previous version from fglrx.
(Thanks to Tyler McAfee for digging this).

Links:
[0] https://bugs.launchpad.net/medibuntu/+bug/97056
[1] https://bugs.launchpad.net/medibuntu/+bug/97056/comments/14
[2] 
http://n01getsout.com/blog/2006/11/26/google-earth-for-linux-freezing-with-ati/

 -- The Medibuntu Team <medibuntu at sos-sts.com>  Thu,  5 Apr 2007 12:33:15 
+0200