[Slackbuilds-users] GoogleEarth not running

[B Watson]

On 3/6/13, Dario Niedermann <dnied at tiscali.it> wrote:
> by following point 2 of the README, which - sorry! - had completely
> escaped me ( `ln -sf /lib/ld-linux.so.2 /lib/ld-lsb.so.3` ).
>
> This should probably be done by the install script, as well as the
> '/etc/ld.so.conf' thing.

Better yet. The SlackBuild should modify the binary so it requires
/lib/ld-2.15.so instead of /lib/ld-lsb.so.3. This can actually be done
with sed, somewhere near the bottom of the .SlackBuild:

sed -i 's,/lib/ld-lsb.so.3,/lib/ld-2.15.so\x00,'
$PKG/opt/$PRGNAM/googleearth-bin

sedding a binary is scary, but it actually does work. The replacement
string has to be the same length as the original (but can be padded with
null bytes), so we can't actually replace it with /lib/ld-linux.so.2 (too
long). That's just a symlink to ld-2.15.so anyway...

The package will break if a newer glibc is installed (e.g. one with
ld-2.16.so instead). I wouldn't consider that a big deal, lots of
3rd-party packages break when upgrading libraries, especially glibc.

The ld.so.conf edit shouldn't be required: the wrapper script
(/opt/GoogleEarth/googleearth) contains code to export LD_LIBRARY_PATH
before running googleearth-bin. The only way you'd need to edit ld.so.conf
would be if you were running (or using ldd on) googleearth-bin directly.

Another point mentioned in the README: upstream changes the tarball
and doesn't include the version number in the filename, so the md5sum
can fail. This could be fixed by hosting the file elsewhere... I could
host it on urchlay.naptime.net, or someone else here could host it,
maybe at http://sourceforge.net/projects/slackbuilds/