Google Earth wont launch "Google Earth appears to be running already. Please kill the existing process"

General system Applications
1

When I click on the Google Earth icon it wont launch & then when I use the terminal I see this

$ google-earth-pro 
Reading profile /etc/firejail/google-earth-pro.profile
Reading profile /etc/firejail/google-earth.profile
Reading profile /home/home/.config/firejail/google-earth.local
Reading profile /etc/firejail/disable-common.inc
Reading profile /home/home/.config/firejail/disable-common.local
Reading profile /etc/firejail/disable-devel.inc
Reading profile /etc/firejail/disable-exec.inc
Reading profile /etc/firejail/disable-interpreters.inc
Reading profile /etc/firejail/disable-passwdmgr.inc
Reading profile /etc/firejail/disable-programs.inc
Reading profile /etc/firejail/whitelist-common.inc
Parent pid 10959, child pid 10960
Private /opt installed in 447.51 ms
18 programs installed in 16.21 ms
Warning: cleaning all supplementary groups
Warning: cleaning all supplementary groups
Warning: cleaning all supplementary groups
Warning: /sbin directory link was not blacklisted
Warning: /usr/sbin directory link was not blacklisted
Warning: cleaning all supplementary groups
Child process initialized in 617.14 ms
Google Earth appears to be running already. Please kill the
 existing process, or delete /home/home/.googleearth/instance-running-lock if this is an error.

Parent is shutting down, bye...

Then when I do

rm /home/home/.googleearth/instance-running-lock

and then start Google Earth it opens normally.

Why is this happening and how can I fix this ?

2

Do you use the terminal to relaunch it or the icon?

3

After using the command

rm /home/home/.googleearth/instance-running-lock

GE launches successfully using both the Terminal and the icon.

4

The only way to see if GE crashes is to run it with the terminal for the first time without using the shortcut. And see if any issues get reported in the terminal.

5

I just did a full system reboot & tried to launch GE for the first time using the terminal and got the same output

$ google-earth-pro 
Reading profile /etc/firejail/google-earth-pro.profile
Reading profile /etc/firejail/google-earth.profile
Reading profile /home/home/.config/firejail/google-earth.local
Reading profile /etc/firejail/disable-common.inc
Reading profile /home/home/.config/firejail/disable-common.local
Reading profile /etc/firejail/disable-devel.inc
Reading profile /etc/firejail/disable-exec.inc
Reading profile /etc/firejail/disable-interpreters.inc
Reading profile /etc/firejail/disable-passwdmgr.inc
Reading profile /etc/firejail/disable-programs.inc
Reading profile /etc/firejail/whitelist-common.inc
Parent pid 1327, child pid 1328
Private /opt installed in 804.05 ms
18 programs installed in 18.91 ms
Warning: cleaning all supplementary groups
Warning: cleaning all supplementary groups
Warning: cleaning all supplementary groups
Warning: /sbin directory link was not blacklisted
Warning: /usr/sbin directory link was not blacklisted
Warning: cleaning all supplementary groups
Child process initialized in 909.67 ms
Google Earth appears to be running already. Please kill the
 existing process, or delete /home/home/.googleearth/instance-running-lock if this is an error.

Parent is shutting down, bye...
6

You can do one more thing. I think that .lock file doesn’t get cleared when you close GE. Do something like.

  • Remove the .lock file.
  • Run GE.
  • Reboot.
  • Don’t launch go to the folder path ls -l .googleearth/ and check if the .lock file is there.

If so that means GE might be running after you close it or it’s not clearing the file after fully closing itself. Which you can confirm by launching GE via terminal. Once open you can close and see the output of the closing sequence of GE. If it doesn’t close and reset the terminal prompt that means GE it is still running.

7

It seems to be a bug that needs to be fixed upstream:

1 Like
8

Yes, you are right. GE is leaving the lock file after closing

$ ls -l .googleearth/ 
total 64
drwx------ 6 home home  4096 Feb  2 14:28  Cache
lrwxrwxrwx 1 home home     8 Feb  2 14:28  instance-running-lock -> /proc/29
-rw-r--r-- 1 home home 25372 Feb  2 13:39  myplaces.backup.kml
-rw-r--r-- 1 home home 25372 Feb  2 14:28  myplaces.kml
drwxr-xr-x 2 home home  4096 Jan 27 14:32 'My Style Templates'

I don’t know if this is a Arch issue or GE issue.

9

That’s a different issue. Its about GE not running at all inside a firejail sandbox. I have fixed that issue by using a local firejail profile for GE.

10

I meant this part in the comments referring to the locking issue, sorry if i was wrong :

Oddly enough, for me (also running Arch Linux btw) this doesn’t happen after rm -f ${HOME}/.googleearth/instance-running-lock before starting it again. When that folder is removed it starts happily again here. A basic shell wrapper script can handle this, but I agree that’s an ugly workaround at best (not to mention things breaks for users using firecfg). Without firejail I noticed GEP doesn’t properly remove that path (which is a symlink to /proc/) after shutting down, resulting in a dangling symlink. That should be fixed upstream IMO. As firejail uses a special setup for /proc this symlink always stays intact, confusing GEP into believing it is still running, so it throws that message shown by you above when you try to start it again. We would need a way to remove a file/dir on the real filesystem after shutting down the sandbox. That kind of functionality does not exist in firejail AFAIK.

I do realize this is not good news. The above - if correct - only hints at explaining what’s going on. Playing with the profile hasn’t resulted in a clean way to ‘fix’ this behaviour yet, if at all possible. Looks like an upstream bug that we can’t do much about. It’s my very first encounter with google-earth-pro though, so perhaps there’s something I’m not seeing here.

11

Sorry I missed that. Thanks. After installing GE it refused to launch inside firejail so I created a custom profile in ~/.config/firejail/google-earth.local with the following

private-bin readlink,dirname,basename,grep,sed

Then GE successfully launched inside firejail but this lock file issue appeared.

12

Try this.

Make a file gelaunch.sh

add this code

#!/bin/bash
google-earth-pro && 
rm /home/home/.googleearth/instance-running-lock

Save the file and make it an execution file.
sudo chmod +x gelaunch.sh

And run the file ./gelaunch.sh and see if it clears the file after closing GE.

1 Like
13

It worked. I made a very small but important (to me) modification. This is my script

#!/bin/bash
firejail google-earth-pro

rm /home/home/.googleearth/instance-running-lock

I added firejail so it launches inside a sandbox. I checked by doing

$ firejail --list
2147:home::/usr/bin/firejail firefox -P 
3388:home::/usr/bin/firejail firefox -P 
4933:home::firejail google-earth-pro
2 Likes
14

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