I use Google Eearth fairly regularly for all sort of things. I like searching places around the world and looking at additional info from for instance National Geographic. It is therefore most annoying that whenever Google decides to change something GE starts to crash for whatever reason most likely due to conflicts between libraries. The crashlogs you’ll see are like:

Major Version 7
Minor Version 1
Build Number 0001
Build Date Jul 12 2013
Build Time 04:22:47
OS Type 3
OS Major Version 3
OS Minor Version 8
OS Build Version 13
OS Patch Version 0
Crash Signal 4
Crash Time 1375944957
Up Time 0.809264

Stacktrace from glibc:
./libgoogleearth_free.so(+0x23915c)[0x7f1d7c46d15c]
./libgoogleearth_free.so(+0x2393bd)[0x7f1d7c46d3bd]
/lib64/libc.so.6[0x33462359b0]
/usr/lib64/nvidia-304xx/libnvidia-glcore.so.304.88(_nv015glcore+0x0)[0x3b89de8be0]

I’m not smart enough to sort out binary stack dumps but I’m pretty good at troubleshooting and logical thinking. The guys on the GE devteam obviously are very graphically oriented and they take every opportunity to suck out as much juice out of hardware to make the graphical rendering at smooth as possible. They therefore look at the loaded graphics drivers and if possible start making use of any piece of graphical kit they can find to use it.

I have an NVidia card with CUDA cores which can accelerate these graphical screen-gadgets pretty well so if there is a conflict in these libraries you’ll get the program to crash.

Basically what I did was I upgraded the NVidia driver to 319.32 and at least that solved the above issue. Than I ran into the problem of GE itself were it saw some sort of corruption in one or more cached files. I removed these from the ~/.googleearth directory after which GE started. I still get the below messages when I start GE but these do not seem to be of influence of using it.

[0809/130918:ERROR:net_util.cc(2195)] Not implemented reached in bool net::HaveOnlyLoopbackAddresses()
[0809/130918:WARNING:backend_impl.cc(1875)] Destroying invalid entry.
[0809/130918:ERROR:nss_ocsp.cc(581)] No URLRequestContext for OCSP handler.
[0809/130920:ERROR:nss_ocsp.cc(581)] No URLRequestContext for OCSP handler.
[0809/130920:ERROR:nss_ocsp.cc(581)] No URLRequestContext for OCSP handler.
[0809/130920:ERROR:nss_ocsp.cc(581)] No URLRequestContext for OCSP handler.

My version currently is :

Google Earth – 7.1.1.1888
Build Date 7/12/2013
Build Time 4:22:44 am
Renderer OpenGL
Operating System Linux (3.8.13.0)
Video Driver NVIDIA Corporation
Max Texture Size 16384×16384
available video memory 2048 MB
Server kh.google.com

Whenever you run into some other inexplicable issues you might start with clearing the cache at ~/unified_cache_leveldb_leveldb2/*

Hope this helps someone.

Cheers,
Erwin