Note to myself: it is possible to change the partition type of a already
formatted (and used) partition. For example, if you have already
formatted the partition with NTFS, but accidentally had created it with
partition type 0x83 (Linux), so Windows can’t read it, since it expects
0x07 (HPFS/NTFS). On Linux, you can use sfdisk for that purpose:
# Be root
# dd if=/dev/sdb of=sdb-bootsector count=1 # backup boot sector
# sfdisk -d /dev/sdb | sed -e 's/Id=83/Id=07/' > /tmp/sdb.txt
# sfdisk /dev/sdb < /tmp/sdb.txt
(fill in the right values for your case)
Of course, good old fdisk works also, use the t command.
Apparently the combination of a WLAN router that blocks IPv6 DNS queries
of type AAAA (in my case, it was a Siemens S1621-Z220-A sold as Alice
Modem 1121 WLAN) and the current version of Google Earth for Linux (I am
using 5.1.3533.1731 from Medibuntu) do not work well together. The
problem is that the router simply throws away AAAA queries (or
generally, any type it does not know), so the DNS query times out.
However, Google Earth does not seem to fall back to IPv4 queries (type
A) in this case, and shows a message about network connectivity errors.
I don’t know if it’s Google Earth’s fault or if the underlying eglibc
resolver of my Linux system does something wrong, anyhow there is a
fairly well-commented bug report on Launchpad for Ubuntu Karmic and
Lucid which explains the issue.
Anyway, I got rid of the problem by manually configuring a nameserver on
my local machine (for example the nameserver(s) of your internet
provider, or the ones of OpenDNS), and not using the WLAN router as a
resolver. NetworkManager allows you to do this by editing a connection
and choosing “Automatic DHCP (Addresses only)” on the IPv4 register tab;
or you can write the settings directly to your /etc/resolv.conf (here
for the OpenDNS servers):
nameserver 208.67.222.222
nameserver 208.67.220.220