Dear Google Earth Team…
It is with great pleasure that I realized your porting efforts to Qt 4 in your 4.3 release of Google Earth. Your software so far lacked visual integration on Linux, but now with “googleearth -style plastique” (KDE) or “googleearth -style cleanlooks” (GNOME) it is now easy to make it look less Windows 95ish and more native. That is until you try to apply e.g. the Oxygen style, or just any 3rd party style.
The reason for that is that your product still ships with a complete set of the Qt libraries which cannot load styles installed system-wide. It would be nice if you could follow the good example of your Qt-using collegues at Skype *), who provide both a version with Qt and one that relies on the system libraries. This would also cause your application to look native instantly.
All the best,
Daniel Molkentin
*) Skype allows to circumvent their forced use of cleanlooks by passing “–disable-cleanlooks” as parameter.
Wow, I didn’t know that was possible at all, have to try that when I get home, an oxygenated Skype would rock (and same for GE of course 🙂
This page shows how to use your system qt libs.
http://groups.google.es/group/earth-linux/browse_thread/thread/e10a5337b0b47ba1#
I cannot confirm it works though since I have the x86_64 qt libs only and they obviously won’t work with google earth which is a 32bit compiled app.
Would it perhaps be possible to change some settings in the qt.conf provided in the Google Earth install directory? Some sort of plug-in path or something?
I’ve seen lots of Linux apps (some on Sourceforge) that deliver a fully self contained version and one that is all system libraries. I see some other libs, such as libGLU, that could use the system version.