Google Earth only works as "sudo"

[Tommy Trussell]

On 5/21/08, Kipton Moravec <kip at kdream.com> wrote:
> 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.

When you go immediately back to the login screen, that means you have
crashed X (the part that draws the images on the screen) but the
operating system is still going along nicely. (You can kill X yourself
by typing command-alt-backspace.) If, however, your system goes
through the boot sequence over again, the operating system has
crashed.

I would suspect a bug in your video driver that is being triggered by
Google Desktop, killing off X. If you are using a closed-source video
driver, you might try the open one, or vice versa. Do a few Google
searches for your video card and you may find there are better drivers
or settings for it.


>  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?

To me this sounds like a result of the mail program being terminated
abruptly -- a configuration file or index has probably gotten
corrupted. You didn't say which email program, but in general you can
look for the "hidden" configuration files and directories in your home
directory, rename them (to make a copy) and try launching the program
again. If the symptoms get worse, you can copy the config files back
the way they were.