Comment 5 for bug 1562948

Or you can just put a en_US locale regardless of your actual locale setting, the only ill effect [I think] being GE shows the USA map when it starts - but I believe everyone sets a 'my start location', so not a problem.

Here's a one line command for this 'all searches end up in Africa' workaround:

sudo sed -i '/exec/ i export LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8' /opt/google/earth/free/googleearth

Thanks