Installing Google Earth on Ubuntu 13.10 64bit

After several attempts to install Google Earth on Ubuntu 13.10 64 bit I finally stumbled upon the solution here.

The solution consists on modifying the Debian control file in the downloaded project to remove the offending dependencies on lsb-core and ia32-libs. Here are the detailed instructions.

Checking dependencies

Make sure you have installed the packages libc6:i386 and lsb-core. You can do this e.g., by typing the following on the command line:

      sudo apt-get install libc6:i386 lsb-core

Building the package

1. Download Google Earth x64 .deb package and extract (yeah, extract instead of installing)
   
2. Go to the expanded folder and cd into DEBIAN. Open the file Control with your favorite editor and remove the following line
   
                       Depends: lsb-core (>= 3.2), ia32-libs
   
3. Delete the downloaded .deb file and rebuild from the expanded folder. For that, cd into the parent folder of the extracted directory from the terminal and issue:
   
                       dpkg -b google-earth-stable_current_amd64
   

Installing the package 

To install the modified .deb package run the following command from the console.

       sudo dpkg -i google-earth-stable_current_amd64.deb

You can also double click on the .deb package to open it with Software Center but that didn't work for me, Software Center simply refused to install it.


Enjoy!