[wellylug] Google Earth issues

[Daniel Pittman]

Steve Macdonald <dakmani1 at yahoo.co.nz> writes:

Your mail client didn't quote my text correctly -- it indented
*everything* which made it hard to tell (initially) who said what.

>> Check /var/log/xorg.0.log (typically, but it may be a slightly
>> differently named log in /var/log) for details of the crash.
>    
> After checking the log you mentioned the only difference between the
> old log and the new one is this at the bottom
>    
> "Fatal server error:
> Caught signal 11.  Server aborting
>    
> (II) SIS(0): Restoring by setting old mode 0x4a"

Well, signal 11 is 'SEGV' or 'segmentation violation' -- a crash, in
English, where something in the software tried to access memory that
doesn't exist.

In other words: something triggered a crash in your X server.

>> Contact your vendor for support -- even if Google Earth is doing
>> crazy things it shouldn't crash the X server so there is a serious
>> bug there.
>    
> And I found this on some google help file but I am not sure what it
> means, I am assuming that this line has to be inserted into some file?

Well, I guess it uses some terms you are not familiar with:

> "GLIBC ISSUES:
>    
> If you crash on startup, you may have an outdated version of glibc, or
> a bad interaction between Nvidia's drivers and glibc's pthread
> support. Many of these cases can be resolved by exporting this
> environment variable before running Google Earth.
>    
> LD_ASSUME_KERNEL=2.4.10"

As the comment says, "exporting this environment variable" is necessary.

Under Linux the way to do that is to run the commands (in a standard
Bourne derived shell such as bash):

  LD_ASSUME_KERNEL=2.4.10
  export LD_ASSUME_KERNEL

The first one sets the environment variable, the second tells the shell
to make that visible to all the processes it runs.

You can try this in a one-shot fashion like this:

  LD_ASSUME_KERNEL=2.4.10 google-earth  # or whatever the command is

If that works you should create a small shell script that just exports
the variables and runs Google Earth.

Oh, and if that fixes the problem then you should send a crash report to
NVIDIA to let them know that another user has been hurt by their broken,
binary-only driver doing the wrong thing.

Regards,
        Daniel
-- 
Digital Infrastructure Solutions -- making IT simple, stable and secure
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