first googleearth ran slowly, then it blew up

[Robert P. J. Day]

  i really hate to give up and just beg for help on this one but i'm
pretty much out of ideas.

  it all started when i downloaded the latest google earth, installed
it on f9, and fired it up for the first time.  it ran, but
slooooooooowly.  quick web search brought me here:

http://www.chizang.net/alex/blog/2008/06/22/google-earth-fedora-9-intel-945gm-drmwaitvblank/

which described almost exactly the trouble i was having.  the video
controller was even the very same one, but the error msg differed in
the 2nd line.  mine was:

do_wait: drmWaitVBlank returned -1, IRQs don't seem to be working correctly.

but was then followed by a suggestion to tweak the vblank_mode
configuration parameter.

  regardless, i figured i had my answer, so i downloaded driconf, and
did what was suggested:

=====
But hey, let’s use our brain and guess that the error message about
drmWaitVBlank means we should change the magic setting labelled
“Synchronization with vertical refresh (swap intervals)”. (This would
be after launching driconf as root, duh.)

On my system, the default was “Initial swap interval 0, obey
application’s choice”, which resulted in epic fail.

Changing it to “Never synchronize with vertical refresh, ignore
application’s choice” was the answer for me.
=====

  that didn't seem to make much difference and, worse, for reasons i
still don't understand, i did something that trashed my entire X
session.  it took me 20 minutes just to be able to start up X again,
after which, when i try to start google earth, i get something very
similar to this:

http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=174678

  not exactly, though -- the library references are not to
lilbqt-mt.so.3, but to the newer libQtGui.so.4, but the general
flavour is pretty much the same.

=====
$ ./googleearth
disabling 3D rasterization
Google Earth has caught signal 11.

Stacktrace from glibc:
  ./googleearth-bin [0x804f403]
  ./googleearth-bin [0x804f916]
  [0x110400]
  /usr/lib/dri/libdricore.so [0x24c7ccf]
  /usr/lib/dri/libdricore.so(_tnl_run_pipeline+0x12b) [0x24c0ba5]
  /usr/lib/dri/i915_dri.so [0x1c1c1c9]
  /usr/lib/dri/libdricore.so(_tnl_draw_prims+0x9a4) [0x24c15f0]
  /usr/lib/dri/libdricore.so [0x24b9551]
  /usr/lib/dri/libdricore.so [0x24aa60b]
  ...
=====

  i'm not sure what to try next.  if anyone has GE running on a
similar system, by all means, drop me a line.  i seem to have all the
dependencies loaded, the correct module for the video (i915), etc.

  thoughts?

rday
--

========================================================================
Robert P. J. Day
Linux Consulting, Training and Annoying Kernel Pedantry:
    Have classroom, will lecture.

http://crashcourse.ca                          Waterloo, Ontario, CANADA
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