Some excellent news this morning for all you Linux jockeys - you can now join the rest of the planet in enjoying Google Earth, as the search monolith has just released (http://earth.google.com/download-earth.html) Version 4 beta of the programme in PC, Mac and Linux flavours.

Version 4 reportedly offers "greater coverage and higher resolution" and comes in French, German, Italian and Spanish variants. We haven't had a chance to give it a run yet, but this early report (http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060613-7041.html) reckons "the application works relatively well on the Linux platform". ®

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