Google Earth

Google Earth is a great application showing satellite imagery of Earth

It can be downloaded from http://earth.google.com/

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Network Use

Google Earth needs a few settings modified to make it work well on a network. Following changes allow you to have a single location on PC to store download images, have some default places relevant for your school and allow students places to roam with them on the network.

Admin Install

We do a number of things to make deployment and use better for our school environment.

First start an install and then go to %temp% and find the Google Earth.msi then use it to create an administration install point.

This will extract all the files and allow easy editing of defaults.

(use msiexec /a "path to\Google Earth.msi" )

Configuration

We modify default_myplaces.kml and lang\default_myplaces_en_AU.kml to our own set of default places and also use a network link to a kml file on server to allow easy updating of student places.

http://www.sydneyboyshigh.com/ge/high.kml

We use this to show students all the sporting venues and local playing fields.

For reduced disk and network bandwidth we customise the location of cache to be a shared local location. All users must have modify rights to this location. This can be done by running script:

md "C:\Program Files\Google\Google Earth\Cache"
cacls "C:\Program Files\Google\Google Earth\Cache" /E /G Users:C

To store students individual places we redirect Google Earth to store on the students home drive (H:\)

The following reg file is deployed with Google Earth. We use Zenworks, but should work with other deployment tools.

REGEDIT4

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Google]

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Google\Google Earth]
"CachePath"="C:\\Program Files\\Google\\Google Earth\\Cache"

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Google\Google Earth Plus]
"CachePath"="C:\\Program Files\\Google\\Google Earth\\Cache"
"DefaultKMLPath"="H:\\GoogleEarth"
"KMLPath"="H:\\GoogleEarth"

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Google\Google Earth Plus\Render]
"FeetMiles"=dword:00000000

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Google\KeyholeCommonSettings]
"KMLPath"="H:\\GoogleEarth"

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Google]

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Google\Google Earth]
"CachePath"="C:\\Program Files\\Google\\Google Earth\\Cache"

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Google\Google Earth Plus]
"wasMaximized"=dword:00000001

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Google\KeyholeCommonSettings]
"KMLPath"="H:\\GoogleEarth"