Google Earth only works as "sudo"

[Tommy Trussell]

On 5/21/08, Graham Watkins <shellycat.gw at ntlworld.com> wrote:
> Hi  folks,
>
>  just installed Google Earth on 8.04.  It creates a desktop icon but when
>  I click on it  I get the splash screen , then the starfield and  ...
>  er,  that's it.  No earth and no response from any menu items.
>
>  However, when I start it as administrator from the command line,
>  everything (or at least everything I've tried so far) works as it should.
>
>  Is this a permissions thing and is there a way of fixing it?

I found a discussion on the ubuntu forums that discusses this:

http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-195536.html

according to that discussion, the problem occurs when you run Google
Earth as sudo the first time, so the permissions get set wrong.

According to that discussion, the simple fix is to open a terminal and
type two commands. (You can copy each line straight from these lines
and paste them into your terminal -- the $USER variable should
automagically be replaced by your username.)

sudo chown $USER:users ~/.googleearth -R
sudo chown $USER:users ~/.local -R