blog.crox.net

There is no 64 bit version of Google Earth for linux, so you'll need to make sure you have the latest version of the following packages first:

app-emulation/emul-linux-x86-baselibs
app-emulation/emul-linux-x86-compat
app-emulation/emul-linux-x86-gtklibs
app-emulation/emul-linux-x86-qtlibs
app-emulation/emul-linux-x86-soundlibs
app-emulation/emul-linux-x86-xlibs

This allowed me to start GE in the first place. But then it was horribly slow, although glxinfo reported "direct rendering: Yes" etc.

When started from the console, GE would output the following:

do_wait: drmWaitVBlank returned -1, IRQs don't seem to be working correctly.
Try running with LIBGL_THROTTLE_REFRESH and LIBL_SYNC_REFRESH unset.

Doing a search led me to try setting LIBGL_ALWAYS_INDIRECT=1 before running Google Earth. Indeed the warning disappeared, and GE was really faster. However, as soon as I would zoom too close, the whole screen was getting more and more sky-blue, until no image was being displayed anymore...

Finally, I found this article, and especially the comments from Eduardo Habkost and "Researcher".

I followed Researcher's instructions, and Google Earth is now working perfectly. For your convenience, I've put drm_nowaitVblank.c here to download (you cannot copy-paste from the original page because the parser there treats the includes as html code). Also to compile the code on amd64 you'll want to use gcc32 and not gcc...