Google Earth fixed itself!

grassushi · n00b Joined: 11 Feb 2005 Posts: 54

Ok, in my experience, it is highly uncommon for a piece of software to "heal" itself.

I installed googleearth-4_beta, and much to my dismay when I started it I got the splash screen, followed very shortly thereafter by a segmentation fault.

I went through the forums, didn't find an answer, and resolved myself to waiting for the next update in the portage tree to possibly resolve it.

Then, just by accident, I clicked on the menu instance for GoogleEarth that I created in my fluxbox menu, and it STARTED ! It said something about a driver update for Google Earth (which I honestly ignored because I was excited that it was suddenly working), and after clicking "OK" it loaded right up!

Now I am not complaining, but I've never heard of software that just fixed itself like that. I know that the first thing Google Earth does when it starts up is connect to Google for updates to locations, etc. Might Google have become aware of a problem with their software, and was able to fix it on their end? Something about that idea seems highly unlikely to me, but nonetheless, it did just start working...

If anyone might know any more about this than me, I would really be very interested to hear how this software just went upon fixing itself.

Thank you in advance,

grassushi_

nixnut · Posted: Thu Jul 20, 2006 4:14 pm Post subject:

Moved from Unsupported Software to Desktop Environments.
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CrazyTerabyte · Apprentice Joined: 30 Dec 2004 Posts: 193

No, certainly it has not fixed by itself.

Certainly it did not download fixes from Google, because you said it crashed (segfault) just after splash screen. There was not enough time to download them. In addition, if you were not using it as root (and I really hope you weren't, it is not safe to run a desktop environment as root), it would be impossible to it write over binaries in /opt/googleearth.

Well, it could try to save fixes on your home, and load them at runtime in some way... But nah... It does not do that. And it is too much work for nothing (it is a lot easier and better to just download and install a new version).

My experience with Google Earth on linux is that it works fine, but often it crashes. It prints nothing to terminal when crashing, I can just say it returns code 76 (echo $? after it crashed).

jure1873 · Apprentice Joined: 09 Feb 2006 Posts: 183

did you upgrade xorg/nvidia/ati drivers?

CrazyTerabyte · Apprentice Joined: 30 Dec 2004 Posts: 193