Running Google Earth under Wine on linux



A while back I talked about Google Earth under Codeweavers wine almost working (or at least I think I mentioned it here, I KNOW I tried it…) Well, I tried with vanilla wine as well and couldn’t get it to work, BUT… I’ve just finished a successful run of it. How you might ask? Here are some of the details…


I hadn’t looked in a while and I’m not quite sure how I stumbled across this link on the subject… now he does a walkthrough of getting it to work with screenshots… if you’re interested in more details with screenshots visit his site… anyway, here are the basics. I moved my .wine folder to .winebackup so I could start fresh and then upgraded to wine-0.9.5-2.1.20060mdk (wine 0.9.5)…

Next I configured wine to pretend to be Windows 98… winecfg and then selected win98 and “apply”d… I copied psapi.dll *(found at dll-files.com ) to my wine system32 folder…. cp psapi.dll /home/avery/.wine/drive_c/windows/system32

Then, I installed DCOM98 (available from Microsoft… WINEDLLOVERRIDES=”ole32,oleaut32,rpcrt4=n” wine dcom98.exe

The next step was running winecfg again to “pretend” to be windows xp… so, winecfg and select winxp and ok.

Next it’s time to install google earth available from Google.

WINEDLLOVERRIDES=”ole32,oleaut32,rpcrt4=n” wine GoogleEarth.exe

After the install it asks if you want to launch Google earth – I chose not to, I also chose not to notify them of problems…

Then to run it….

WINEDLLOVERRIDES=”ole32,usp10,msvcrt=n” wine /home/avery/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/Google/Google\ Earth/GoogleEarth.exe

Now, I disabled menus (ctrl-1 ctrl-2) there are some strange effects on fonts (they spread out on the map.) The overlay (?) menus just don’t behave well (disabling them helped the usage)… it’s far from a perfect running of Googleearth, but… you do get the full 3d map effect scrolling/in/out/etc easily.

Right now, that’s quite hackish… but it’s at such a usable state that I would wonder how long before codeweavers includes some support for it in crossover office?

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