I run OpenSUSE Tumbleweed, which often keeps shared libraries at versions that binary-only applications have difficulties supporting. I own a OneWheel and Google Earth Pro is a nice source for inspecting areas for useful paths/trails, finding interesting things, but it breaks -- often -- in Tumbleweed, even though the .rpm installs fine0
0 This varies; sometimes zypper will report that a dependency cannot be met, other times it will hum along just fine, accepting the version that's there, but segfault when starting because even though the package can't see the conflict, the app doesn't work with the version installed.
I've wrapped it all up into a docker container and script which will build it, attempt to expose the necessary components and starts it. It ... works ... with some limitations that I haven't worked out.
After cloning and navigating to the directory, type
./earth-in-a-box
Every time it is run that way it checks that the image and container exists, creates them if they do not, and starts Earth. It executes without disabling shm via the QT environment variable; overall, performance appears on-par with how it used to work when I could simply run it locally.
- You need to have $XAUTHORITY, $DISPLAY, $USER and $HOME variables correctly assigned.
- Your user account needs to be in the docker group to run the script.
- It works for me, on OpenSUSE Tumbleweed, with a lot of customizations; it may not work for you but I hope it does.
- The script to run everything requires
zsh - I can't distribute the actual Google Earth Pro binary, that's Google's and it's forbidden. So it's done via the package repository when building the docker file. If they change the URL or decide to stop offering it for free, this will stop working.
BOTTOM LINE: I wrote this for myself and thought I'd share. I hope it works for you. If it doesn't, pop in an issue and I'll do my best but I commit to nothing :). Add a PR and you're more likely to see that handled.
21-Jul-2021 - Fixed black on black / corrupted menus. The issue was resolved with the addition of --ipc host, though other changes made may have been required
The idea sprung from bcdbrule/google-earth on Docker Hub. Unfortunately, the formatting screwed up the document and after sorting that out, it performed very poorly on my hardware and had a bug where menus/dialogs would occasionally be black/corrupted.
Ideally, one would just be able to visit Docker Hub, pull an image and follow the instructions to start it (or, perhaps, Earth would be available as a snap/AppImage/etc), but Google forbids distribution of Google Earth Pro; it's commercial. I'm also not interested in violating Google's licenses, so there's no Google Earth Pro anything in this repository. This script simply creates a new container and downloads Google Earth Pro from Google, for you. If the link to the software disappears, this script will be useless.
You can't simply distribute Google Earth Pro; it's commercial. Running earth-in-a-box downloads Google Earth directly from Google and builds a container for you, locally.
- Since I'm on
nvidiahardware, figure out ifnvidia-dockerand make that an option. - Build in something to check for updates and re-build the container when that happens.
- Investigate exactly what resolved the broken menus among
--ipc host--device ...,--shm-size 0and removal of/dev/shmvolume. - Determine exactly what
--devicedoes, if-v <card>:<card>is needed with it - Determine the right value for
--shm-sizemake sure-v /dev/shm:/dev/shm/doesn't slow things down.
Both of my primary computers run OpenSUSE Tumbleweed and I use Google Earth mostly on laptops which have nvidia proprietary drivers running. Some of the things that work, here, might work because of my odd setup -- the only place I've tested it.
You may need to worry about cgroups and apparmor profiles, but I didn't. If you send me a PR, I'm happy to review/apply if it doesn't break anything. Good luck to ya' though, this is very much an "on-the-side" project; and it's written in zsh/bash and Dockerfile!