After upgrading to Google Earth 5.1 I now get the following error when starting from command line. Error: ./libstdc++.so.6: version `GLIBCXX_3.4.9' not found (required by ./libgoogleearth_lib.so).
It's also worth noting that if I click the Google Earth icon it just sits there with no errors.
To fix this simply remove or rename libstdc++.so.6 and libgcc_s.so.1 in the installation directory.
For some people this will be:
cd /opt/google-earth/
For others (me included) this will be:
cd ~/google-earth/
To rename the files:
sudo mv libstdc++.so.6 libstdc++.so.6.orig
sudo mv libgcc_s.so.1 libgcc_s.so.1.orig
Now Google Earth should start without the error!
Ubuntu 9.10 Google Earth