In his CES keynote in January, Google co-founder Larry Page gave the consumer electronics industry some well-deserved heat for producing exclusive, incompatible and non-interoperable gear. Also, at the same show, Google promoted a package of software products that only ran on Windows. In the Q&A I pointed out this irony and asked what Google would do to fix their own platform-exclusivity problems. Larry admitted that this was "a problem", and said they were working on fixing it.
We reported on one result -- Picasa for Linux -- last month. This month we can report that Google Earth is also available for Linux as well. The first iteration, just released at this writing (in May), is Google Earth 4 beta, also released simultaneously on Windows XP and Mac OS X.
Unlike Picasa's Linux implementation, which was built with Wine, Google Earth for Linux is a native application, built with the Qt development kit. It requires 2.4 or later kernel versions, and has been tested on modern versions of Ubuntu, SUSE, Fedora Core, Linspire, Gentoo, Debian and Red Hat. Download the free application at http://earth.google.com.
- Doc Searls