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World Wind -- an open source alternative to Google Earth

Posted by dave on · 4 comments
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Few of Google's projects, rumors of projects, and acquisitions have generated as much envy among Linux users as Google Earth. In some respects the search engine behemoth is quite OS-agnostic, but the 3D virtual globe remains limited to Windows desktops only. But there is an alternative. NASA's World Wind project -- like Google Earth -- is a 3D planetary visualization system that overlays satellite imagery, weather, political, and topological map data. Zoom in and look for your childhood home, fly past your favorite landmarks, study the coastlines for continental drift -- you have all of the same options. The only difference is that World Wind is open source.

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Comments (4)

salparadise ·
But it's still only available for Windows. Let's hope someone ports it across.
Tsela ·
What I don't understand is why Google Earth is only available on Windows. It's built on Qt and OpenGL! (and even advertises that its DirectX version isn't working as well as the OpenGL one)
mvermeer ·
I have it (ww2d) installed and working right here on Linux... was a bit of tinkering. Not sure everything works as it should though.
TxtEdMacs ·
I have seen this site previously, however, again just now without either experiencing problems on Firefox.

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8b4) Gecko/20050908 Firefox/1.4

Guess I am cheating a bit (Firefox a.k.a. Deer Park), try it. Not perfect, but so far better than my average experience with 1.0.6.

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