[conspire] Installation help!

[Rick Moen]

Quoting jose tav (josetav at hotmail.com):

> Hi Folks!,  please, I need help installing googleEarthLinux.bin on my laptop.
> I will prefer a script to do it, unless it can be done thru. a drop down menu.

Hi, Jose!  The difficulty I'm having in attempting to help you is:  You
don't actually say what you tried, and didn't work.  So, it's impossible
to know what the problem symptom was.  I can make a decent _guess_ that
you have downloaded the file "googleEarthLinux.bin" and believe the
download to be complete & intact -- but I can't determine anything else
from your post.

Reading around on the Internet, I see mention of one common problem:
People attempt to run that binary, and (if it's run from a terminal
window), one sees "Extraction failed" after which the process summarily
dies without yielding any other clues.  (If you tried to run
"googleEarthLinux.bin" from some sort of graphical launcher, you
wouldn't see even that much error output.  That's one reason to favour 
starting graphical applications from a terminal window's command line,
when you're trying to diagnose their problems.)

Commentators said that the cryptic "Extraction failed" message turned
out, after some examination, to mean "the target filesystem ran out of
disk space".  They say you can run the program with a "--target"
command-line option to specify _where_ it should go (i.e., a partition
with room to spare) as opposed to the default location (whatever that is).

Open a command window.  Do:

$ cd
$ mkdir GoogleEarth
$ cd GoogleEarth
$ sh /tmp/GoogleEarthLinux.bin  --target .

That should result in the installer running and putting Google Earth's
files into a new /home/josetav/GoogleEarth directory tree.  Once you've
done that, you can create a KDE/GNOME/whatever graphical laucher thingie
pointing to its startup file, whatever _that_ may be.  Or make a symlink
in /usr/local/bin pointing to it.

The "$", above, stands for your shell prompt, and I'm assuming for
illustrative purposes that you downloaded GoogleEarthLinux.bin into
/tmp.  (It may well be somewhere else.  It's wherever you and your Linux
desktop software put it.)