Google Earth only works as "sudo"

[Dana J. Laude]

Kipton Moravec wrote:
> On Wed, 2008-05-21 at 09:49 -0500, Tommy Trussell wrote:
>> On 5/21/08, Graham Watkins <shellycat.gw at ntlworld.com> wrote:
>>> Hi  folks,
>>>
>>>  just installed Google Earth on 8.04.  It creates a desktop icon but when
>>>  I click on it  I get the splash screen , then the starfield and  ...
>>>  er,  that's it.  No earth and no response from any menu items.
>>>
>>>  However, when I start it as administrator from the command line,
>>>  everything (or at least everything I've tried so far) works as it should.
>>>
>>>  Is this a permissions thing and is there a way of fixing it?
>> I found a discussion on the ubuntu forums that discusses this:
>>
>> http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-195536.html
>>
>> according to that discussion, the problem occurs when you run Google
>> Earth as sudo the first time, so the permissions get set wrong.
>>
>> According to that discussion, the simple fix is to open a terminal and
>> type two commands. (You can copy each line straight from these lines
>> and paste them into your terminal -- the $USER variable should
>> automagically be replaced by your username.)
>>
>> sudo chown $USER:users ~/.googleearth -R
>> sudo chown $USER:users ~/.local -R
>>
> 
> I saw this and said that sounds cool.
> 
> So I went to synaptic package manager, and installed it. It put an ICON
> in the menu under Internet.
> 
> Selected the menu and it said there was a new version, and it would
> install it.
> 
> Then it crashed my system. It came back to the Ubuntu Login screen. I
> figured it must be the two commands:
> 
>> sudo chown $USER:users ~/.googleearth -R
>> sudo chown $USER:users ~/.local -R
>>
> 
> So I opened up a terminal window and cut and pasted each of the commands.
> 
> Tried it again and again it crashed Ubuntu. It came back to the login screen.
> 
> What do I look for, what should I do?
> 
> The crash also screwed up my mail program. It used to have the list 
> of emails above a window with the currently select email displayed under it.
> Now the window is only the list of emails. If I click on an email a new window
> pops up with the contents of the email. How do I fix that?

Sorry to barge into the thread, but I never could get it to run on my 
laptop which as the 64-bit version of kubuntu 8.04 on it. Works find
on my desktop though. (32-bit version of kubuntu 8.04)

Dana