Marble: 'Googe Earth Lite' Comes Free With KDE 4

EVERYONE seems to love using Google Earth.
It is such a thrill to use, allowing you to zoom across oceans and continents at the click of a mouse button, or to look at your own home from the heavens (and, let's be honest here, your neighbour's/worst enemy's, too).
Within seconds of my first install of Google Earth (http://earth.google.com/) some months ago, I was 'hovering' in the cloudless sky over my mother's villa on the Costa Blanca in Spain – you know, the one next to the golf course, just past the salt flats, close to that nice, small water park...
Since it was first unleashed on the world Google Earth has grown into a remarkably useful tool, but for Linux users this ability to whizz around the planet has not always been a smooth journey.
If you have been one of the lucky ones, Google Earth has been available in your distribution's package repository, just a few simple clicks away.
Some have not been so lucky – the proof is in the numerous forum postings you will find on a variety of distribution sites from people struggling to install and run the program.
I recently installed Arch Linux on my main desktop machine and chose as my desktop environment KDE 4.1.
And with it came a lovely little application called Marble (http://edu.kde.org/marble/), a desktop globe program – essentially, Google Earth Lite – which is part of the default KDE 4 Education selection.
If you check out the screenshots you will see how closely these two amazing applications appear in terms of their graphical appearance.
Of course, once you look under the hood, so to speak, Marble lags some way behind its competitor, which enjoys a wealth of input from users worldwide plus integration with Google Maps.
But that is not to say that Marble isn't a remarkably useful and enjoyable tool in its own right and, in some ways, its more limited scope makes it more accessible than Google Earth.
I am hopeful, too, that the more people use Marble, the better it will get through community involvement and development.
Here are some of the main features of Marble:

You can pan and zoom around and you can look up places and roads. A mouse click on a place label will provide the respective Wikipedia article.
It is also possible to measure distances between locations or watch the current cloud cover.
For example, the following screenshot shows the distance from my home city, Glasgow, Scotland, to Battle Creek, Michigan (the nearest town I could find to the home of my friend Steve Lake, of Raiden's Realm fame – sorry, Steve, Marshall didn't show on the map!)
Marble offers different thematic maps: A classroom-style topographic map, a satellite view, street map, Earth at night and temperature and precipitation maps.
It is possible in Marble to view the Earth as a globe or as one of two format flat maps.
Although there are few to choose from at the moment, it is also possible to download and install other thematic maps with just a couple of clicks, like the Crustal Ages example shown here.
And, finally, probably the best thing of all the good things about Marble: It is Free/Open Source Software, promotes the use of free maps and is available for all major operating systems (Linux/Unix, MS Windows and Mac OS X).
I encourage you to give it a try – I think you will like it.