Google Earth had quit working on my computer (pclinuxos, kde64, fully updated). And it was no longer in the repository. I had deleted it but wanted to try again to see if I could make it work. I found the following, tried it and, so far anyway, it is working. Just go to terminal, paste this command and press enter and it will download and install it for you:
wget http://dl.google.com/earth/client/current/GoogleEarthLinux.bin && chmod +x GoogleEarthLinux.bin && ./GoogleEarthLinux.bin
It can't get any easier.
I guess the person who wrote it is assuming that everyone knows how to open a terminal and know how to go to "root" (which is easy but if no one has done it before it can all seem pretty daunting).
Now I don't guarantee that this will work for anyone and everyone who might want to try it. All I can say is that it works for me. Now watch it crash next time I boot up, lol!