I installed GE on Kubuntu Dapper using builtin ATI driver, everything worked fine (considering not having 3D accel). However, I upgraded my video drivers using ATI's brand & installer. After upgrading the drivers & cold booting, again, the rest of the desktop worked fine. However, now GE freezes on startup on the splash screen (though not locking up puter), using the K menu link, console command, as regular user, and as sudo. I've tried deleting all installed files, both in /opt and in my home dir (uninstall script errors out), then reinstalling. Still nothing. I haven't tried going back to my old video driver yet, but I don't see that changing anything. I also ran GE using strace with the command "strace -o ge googleearth" as a regular user, then ctrl+c to end the prog when it froze. However, I don't understand the output. This is on a Compaq laptop with the ATI Radeon xpress 200M (RS480 5955) w/ 128MB shared mem using driver v8.29.06. Any ideas? Thanks in advance!

Jeremy

I too have an ATI Radeon Xpress 200m, with latest driver from ATI. Turion 64, Dapper 6.06. GE was working fine for many weeks with the ATI driver. Tonight, when I opened GE, i was prompted to update. I started to download the update and the screen went white. Had to hard restart. After restart, part of the.bin file was on my desktop. I opened GE again and it did not prompt to update. It was hang on the splash screen but not locking up the puter. Deleted files in the home directory. Reinstalled with latest version on GE web site. Still hangs.

This is a frustrating issue, because it's either Google Earth messing up because of something in your placemarks file, try moving it somewhere outside of ~/.googleearth and see if it starts up.

Or the more likely cause, is simply the ATI driver is causing some fault in the Google Earth graphics code. Rolling back the ATI driver may fix that issue (but certainly isn't the solution)

Same Problem here!

I also got a hint from GE to upgrade and did it. Until then it ran fine.
After that it hangs at the splash screen. A kill (-TERM) is still recognized and GE terminates as it should with the TERM signal.

I then updated drivers (ATI Radeon x600, driver 8.29.6, SuSE 10.1 x86_64), the System (from SuSE 10.0 to 10.1), etc. No succes. No errors displayed, etc. So it is hard to find out whats the reason for the hang.

I tried around a lot, but still do not have an Idea. Software like bzflag runs fine, but the framerate with fgl_glxgears dropped fromm 700 fps to 200fps with the newer drivers.

I also tried the previous GE version 4.0.1563, but this also does the same.

Hopefully someone finds the reason. I'll keep searchning ..

Tried moving my .kml files like you said, but didn't work.

Do you mean use an earlier version of ATI drivers, or going back to the default ubuntu drivers, san 3d? Thanks in advance!

Jeremy

If you're using the xorg-driver-fglrx from the Ubuntu repositories, I'm assuming that there's an older version contained somewhere on it, though I havn't the foggiest idea where or how. You can probably look it up easily enough though from the Ubuntu forums.

Or if you installed fglrx using the ATI installer, just grab an older version from the ATI website and run it and see if it works, YMMV.

I had the same problem installing Suse 10.1 Pro on an AMD64x2 XPLIO machine and thought it was an ATI Radeon on motherboard graphics card problem (same as yours). That card gave me frequent white screens even with the proprietary driver. I thus bought an NVIDIA 7300 and overrode the ATI onboard card but had the same problem. Ouch. I checked and shut down the firewall and still had the same problem. I therefore decided to reinstall Suse 10.1 but this time without installing the firewall and voila Googleearth finally worked and went beyond the "initializing" stage. Odd that I have a Suse 9.2 AMD64 machine and had no problem with the firewall installed. The iptables rules must have changed to block Googleearth initializing. I am behind a firewall of another computer so I am not overly concerned with having no firewall on the new computer. Give it a shot without the firewall and see if it works but not for too long in an unprotected state. I would like to know what the changes in the firewall rules were, if at all, from 9.2 to 10.1.

It seems that the problem here is the same as in http://bbs.keyhole.com/ubb/showthreaded.php/Cat/0/Number/468731/page/0

Did anyone find a solution?

Updated to 4.0.2414, but nothing changed. GoogleEarth still cannot start.

Does anybody read this fora? Specially, does anyone realted to google ever read this error reports?

i am reading this forum and would be glad to have a solution as well, as i am having the same problem.
my system is a debian linux sid unstable amd64.
i had googleearth up and running, but this changed with a system upgrade from testing to unstable.
i believe it has to do with the xorg version, but it could have to do as well with the fglrx-driver update for my radeon 9600 pro graphics card or other things.
actually i am not considering downgrading to find out, instead i hope that someone fixes this issue.