On Thursday 10 January 2008, Karl Larsen wrote: > It sounds to me since it does the same thing on F7 and F8 that there > might be a problem with google-earth. It might be that it is designed to > work in the ubuntu operating system. I'm running Google Earth right now on my F8 system. I didn't have to do anything special. The system is a Dell Inspiron 640m laptop with Intel graphics, and Google Earth 'Just Worked' with no extra drivers required. On my desktop F8 system, the only difference is that I have an nVidia card (so that SecondLife will work; we are doing some educational development in SL); in order to get GoogleEarth to work, I installed the livna nvidia driver, and it just works. The livna RPM of the nVidia driver IS THE NVIDIA DRIVER THAT NVIDIA DISTRIBUTES; it's just packaged properly for Fedora, and just works (at least on my hardware). If you use the raw nVidia driver file you will have problems due to the GL library problem already mentioned; the nVidia raw driver simply doesn't respect the existing ownership of some files, and, since it was installed to allow the RPM database to know about that, the next time that portion of you system is updated the nVidia files will be overwritten (which will crash the nVidia driver). And, if the nVidia installer doesn't register those overwritten files with the RPM database, just exactly how does RPM know to not overwrite when that portion is updated? This is nVidia's fault for not working with the installed system's package manager; it's not Fedora's fault. The livna crew have made the nVidia distributed binary drivers 'Fedora-fied' (for lack of a better word) and the system then works correctly. Again, the livna nVidia drivers ARE the nVidia written and distributed drivers, just with the packaging change to allow the nVidia driver to peacefully coexist with the rest of the system. This is one reason that, if at all possible, I try to always use properly RPM packaged programs rather than try to build from source (there is one major exception to this rule for me, and that is Plone, since the Plone versioning is pretty critical, and upgrades aren't necessarily smooth; plus, Zope and Python 2.5 are not friends yet; in the Plone case I use the plone.org unified installer, which installs all needed dependencies in a separate tree). If i install a package that overwrites an RPM-managed file, then I can EXPECT an upgrade to the package that, according to the RPM database, owns that file, to cause system breakage. This is basic system administration stuff. -- Lamar Owen www.pari.edu
