Hi.
My name is Steve and I’m new to SUSE and relatively new to Linux/Unix in general. I have recently installed SUSE 11.0 on a Dell Dimension 9100 that has dual core 3.2GHz CPU, 1GB memory and ATI Radeon X600 graphics card and have gradually tweaked things to enable mp3 and dvd’s to play properly in Kaffeine. I have now moved on to other applications and one of those is Google Earth. I have successfully installed the software but it is running extremely slowly and starts up with the following warning:
‘You are running Google Earth in OpenGL with software emulation’
It then suggests updating my graphics card driver. I’m not sure if this is necessary to be honest. I believe that direct rendering isn’t working in OpenGL for some reason. I would be greatful for some direction on this issue. Thanks.
On 2008-09-19, dell boy <dell_boy@no-mx.forums.opensuse.org> wrote:
> My name is Steve and I’m new to SUSE and relatively new to Linux/Unix
> in general. I have recently installed SUSE 11.0 on a Dell Dimension 9100
> that has dual core 3.2GHz CPU, 1GB memory and ATI Radeon X600 graphics
> card and have gradually tweaked things to enable mp3 and dvd’s to play
> properly in Kaffeine. I have now moved on to other applications and one
> of those is Google Earth. I have successfully installed the software but
> it is running extremely slowly and starts up with the following
> warning:
>
> ‘You are running Google Earth in OpenGL with software emulation’
>
> It then suggests updating my graphics card driver. I’m not sure if this
> is necessary to be honest. I believe that direct rendering isn’t working
> in OpenGL for some reason. I would be greatful for some direction on
> this issue. Thanks.
Go check if the 3D support of your card has ben switched on.
(Yast/Hardware/Graphics Card)
After switching it on, you’ll have to restart KDE. (just log out and back in
again).
–
Elevators smell different to midgets
Ok. It wasn’t checked. I checked it, ran the test and saved the configuration. Re-booted. Tried to run Google Earth. The program attempted to run displaying the Google Earth splash screen and then SUSE defaulted to my login screen ???
I logged in and the same thing happened. Other applications appear to be running ok still. On restarting I notice that the halt sequence now displays weird coloured text in a CLI screen split into 4 segments. Something that didn’t happen before I changed the graphics card config.
I now appear to be in a worse position than before the change.
Had this problem with a X300/X500 ATI card. To get GE working (and accelerated) I had to (obviously) install the proprietary ATI driver AND there was an issue with one of the OpenGL libraries file installed, that had to be relinked to another version IIRC. As this was months ago it should be fixed by now, if not you can google it. I’m currently running GE 4.2.205 with ATI driver 8.45.4 - both old, I know, but they work…
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