Many thanks for the replies, unfortunately nothing has so far worked. A small correction the distribution used is actually current Debian stable. A search on the net shows a lot of people are having problems on both Debian and Ubuntu. Interestingly the symptoms on my system do not match any of the above problems. It seems to be worth a try to get rid of the NVdia closed src drivers and see what happens as quite a number of cures have invloved playing around with the closed src driver files. Various solutions have been put up and it appears that clear it does work on some systems. Google earth though appears to be quite a fragile/picky program. In my case it certainly worked on Debian 6.0. Of my 4 systems one is running Debian 7.4 i386, another 7.4 amd64, the third debian testing i386. The forth is running 6.0 i386, GE was working on this (note 1), unfortunately this has had an Intel 530 series SSD fail recently and is out of action till I get around to replacing the drive. I will keep it at Debian 6.0 and see if GE (still) works on it............. Note 1, the amount of Debian i386 in the above list, 3 out of 4 machines, is because I use wine I have compiled myself (a later version of wine than Debian had being required). Now the debian packages of wine do work on my amd64 machine but I simply have not been able to get wine to compile on amd64 inspite of following a number of sugestions from various forums. Lindsay