Google Earth crashing on start up in Ubuntu 10.04 LTS x86_64

Today I installed Google Earth on my laptop which runs Ubuntu 10.04 LTS 64 bit and to my surprise Google Earth would crash immediately upon starting. This was easily solved after searching the Google Earth forums but thought I would post the fix here just in case any of my readers encounter this issue. The fix is simple and shown below:

Step 1. Open a terminal
Step 2. #  cd google-earth/
Step 3. # wget http://librarian.launchpad.net/7037027/libGL.so.1 -O libGL.so.1
Step 4. Start Google Earth and it should be working.

It appears the cause of the failure is a simple rendering library issue – This fix is specifically for version 5.2.1.1329 (beta)