Saturday, January 25, 2014

Google Earth on Ubuntu 13.10

Google Earth requires ia32-libs, you'll see the following message when install Google Earth on Ubuntu 13.10:

dpkg -i google-earth-stable_current_amd64.deb

 google-earth-stable depends on ia32-libs; however:
  Package ia32-libs is not installed.

ia32-libs on 13.10 has been replaced by 3 separate packages as the following:

apt-get install ia32-libs
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
Package ia32-libs is not available, but is referred to by another package.
This may mean that the package is missing, has been obsoleted, or
is only available from another source
However, the following packages replace it:
  lib32z1 lib32ncurses5 lib32bz2-1.0

apt-get install lib32z1 lib32ncurses5 lib32bz2-1.0

if you attempt to install google earth package again it would still complain missing ia32-libs, you can use the ignore-depends option to bypass this:
dpkg -i --ignore-depends=ia32-libs google-earth-stable_current_amd64.deb

you may need to run the following to correct some other missing packages:
apt-get install -f

In short, just copy & paste the following:
apt-get install lib32z1 lib32ncurses5 lib32bz2-1.0 ; \
dpkg -i --ignore-depends=ia32-libs google-earth-stable_current_amd64.deb ; \
apt-get install -f -y