Google Earth on FreeBSD
I was reading on some of the FreeBSD mailing lists the other day (I subscribe to many so I can’t remember which one it was) that someone had successfully installed the Google Earth for Linux application on FreeBSD. Someone else chimed in and stated that they would work on a port for it for the FreeBSD ports tree. Well, it is now ported to FreeBSD and in the ports tree as /usr/ports/astro/google-earth.
I installed it last night on my laptop and it worked like a champ. It is a little bit sluggish due to the fact that I have an Intel graphics chipset and the OpenGL support for my card, in Windows or FreeBSD, is not what it should be. Running the application with software acceleration worked but the Google Earth application did warn me that it might not perform as one would want.
So, this is cool. You can now run Google Earth on Linux as well as FreeBSD with the Linux binary compatibility features of FreeBSD. I think that is cool! Every time something new is ported to FreeBSD it makes me feel good that the FreeBSD community is staying on top of the applications available to FreeBSD users. A huge thank you goes out to the FreeBSD port maintainers for all their hard work and dedication to the project.
Until next time…