SOLVED Problems with googleearth package

[David Fox]

On Sat, Sep 6, 2008 at 2:05 PM, David Curtis <dcurtis at uniserve.com> wrote:
> Do you have a 3D accelerated video card and the driver to support it?

Not having sse2 might cause problems with the nvidia driver binary if
the OP has an nvidia card. Recently, the nvidia binary (169.12 which I
was trying on Debian Lenny) was built with support hard coded for
sse2. Result, SIGILL whenever when it was used. There were supposed
workarounds but they did not work, and since my system at the time did
not support sse2 (I had an Athlon tbird) I had to downgrade to the
prior version.

> My problem with 4.3 is that my really old CPU has no SSE2 [1] support.
> What's the output of 'cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep sse2'? (pretty sure all
> 64 bit processors support it though)

This probably doesn't affect GoogleEarth because I was able to run it
(at least 4.2) on my Lenny platform, although it ran slowly. Since it
never did a SIGILL, I would say there's no problem with sse2
instructions not being supported.

I would expect that all amd64 type platforms support SSE2, but that's
moot as far as googleearth is concerned, since googleearth is strictly
a 32-bit application.

That being said, I had numerous problems with googleearth (both 4.2
and 4.3) but not due to the binary nvidia driver. For instance, I'd
get a crash dump whenever switching to Sky View, and I'd get the
program to crash at other times. 4.3 on amd64 seems to be better
behaved, at any rate.