Marble virtual globe / 20 / 2014 / Archive / Magazine / Home

Marble virtual globe

Pale Blue Dot

Tim Schürmann

Once a regular part of every classroom, the good old world globe has been almost completely replaced by Google Maps. With the Marble program, the globe has made something of a timely comeback.

Marble is one of the educational programs of the KDE Software Collection; it is therefore in the repositories of all the major distributions. Many distros install the virtual globe by default, but not Ubuntu. Because Marble is a KDE program, during installation it will drag in a large amount of KDE libraries, adding up to nearly 100MB. Given the enormous size of modern hard disks and high-speed Internet connections, this is not really a problem, and it means you will also have these libraries installed if you want to use other KDE apps later.

Although Marble looks somewhat unimpressive, it provides more than just a world globe. You can plan a trip inventory, set the altitude profile for a bike tour, or even fly over the moon.

Rolling

After startup, Marble shows the Earth image on the right side of the screen, as in Figure 1, with a universe of stars as its background. At the bottom right edge, you'll find the navigation bar. You already may be familiar with this from Google Maps. The arrows at the top are for rotating the globe. The plus and minus slider lets you zoom in and out. The scale ruler is at bottom left, and the Altitude in the bottom status bar shows the distance from Earth of the view.

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