Google Earth Pro on Ubuntu Installing Problems and Fixes

Ubuntu has proven itself to be a fickle OS in the sense that it can be a lot easier to work around, but at the same time it is highly predisposed to presenting issues that normally wouldn’t be encountered on a Windows PC. One of such problems for many Ubuntu users has been the installation of Google Earth Pro on Linux 16.04 LTS. There are quite a few users that have reported having trouble with this particular task, as nothing seems to work after a certain point.

What’s the problem?

According to users that have experienced this issue, after they download the .DEB file that corresponds with their processor model, things get rough. They are allowed to proceed and attempt to install the software through the software manager existent by default in Ubuntu systems, but after that the problems start to appear. More specifically, upon opening the Dash, there is simply nothing to software available. How can you install Google Earth when Google Earth is not there? That is the mind-boggling question that many have been trying to answer, but to no avail.

Popular error messages

Upon attempting to install Google Earth Pro, Ubuntu Linux users are often greeted with a series of error messages that not all of them know how to handle or what they mean even. Before we continue, we should take a look at these messages and see what they all mean. Here are the most frequent error messages received when trying to install Google Earth Pro:

• Err:26 http://ppa.launchpad.net/ferramroberto/linuxfreedomlucid/ubuntuxenial/main amd64 Packages
  404 Not Found
• Err:33 http://ppa.launchpad.net/openambit/ppa/ubuntuxenial/main amd64 Packages
  404 Not Found
• W: GPG error: http://qgis.org/debianxenial InRelease: The following signatures couldn’t be verified because the public key is not available: NO_PUBKEY CAEB3DC3BDF7FB45
• E: Failed to fetch http://ppa.launchpad.net/ubuntugis/ubuntugis-unstable/ubuntu/dists/codename/main/source/Sources 404 Not Found
• E: Failed to fetch http://ppa.launchpad.net/ferramroberto/linuxfreedomlucid/ubuntu/dists/xenial/main/binary-amd64/Packages404 Not Found
• E: Failed to fetch http://ppa.launchpad.net/openambit/ppa/ubuntu/dists/xenial/main/binary-amd64/Packages404 Not Found E: Some index files failed to download. They have been ignored, or old ones used instead.

Let’s start easy and see what’s up with the 404 errors. To keep it short, the error containing 404 mean that the service was unable in finding any packages. This isn’t exactly a problem solver but it does point users in a favorable direction as they are no longer required to run in circles trying to elucidate the mystery. Moving onward, there is a particular error message that has something interesting about it. More specifically, we’re talking about W: GPG error: http://ppa.launchpad.net trusty InRelease: The following signatures couldn’t be verified because the public key is not available: NO_PUBKEY 8BAF9A6F. This error signals that the public key is missing or broken. Luckily, there is a way to fix it. Users need to fix their repositories by using a terminal with apt-key.