I seem to have solved the problem.
My pc was running with the RADEON graphics driver originally provided by the initial SUSE11 install. I believe that this driver may not include 3D acceleration. The more up to date driver is provided by the x11-video-fglrxG01 package, which I appeared to have installed on my pc, but for some reason my system wasn't using the driver provided by this package.
I confirmed my pc was using the original driver by opening a console window and typing the command
fglrxinfo
and if the word MESA as opposed to ATI appears in the screen output string, then the original driver is installed.
This was the output after installing the up to date driver.
steve@linux-nsk5:~> fglrxinfo
display: :0.0 screen: 0
OpenGL vendor string: ATI Technologies Inc.
OpenGL renderer string: RADEON X600 Series
OpenGL version string: 2.1.7873 Release
I managed to get the driver installed by using 1-click found at
CyberOrg » Getting NVIDIA and ATI drivers on openSUSE 11.0
Re-booted and ran fglrxinfo to confirm the above output. Google-earth is now working as it should.
PS. Also had to copy libGL.so.1.2 from /usr/lib/ to /home/steve/Desktop/google-earth/libGL.so.1
Note that the file is renamed to libGL.so.1