I had the same problem installing Suse 10.1 Pro on an AMD64x2 XPLIO machine and thought it was an ATI Radeon on motherboard graphics card problem (same as yours). That card gave me frequent white screens even with the proprietary driver. I thus bought an NVIDIA 7300 and overrode the ATI onboard card but had the same problem. Ouch. I checked and shut down the firewall and still had the same problem. I therefore decided to reinstall Suse 10.1 but this time without installing the firewall and voila Googleearth finally worked and went beyond the "initializing" stage. Odd that I have a Suse 9.2 AMD64 machine and had no problem with the firewall installed. The iptables rules must have changed to block Googleearth initializing. I am behind a firewall of another computer so I am not overly concerned with having no firewall on the new computer. Give it a shot without the firewall and see if it works but not for too long in an unprotected state. I would like to know what the changes in the firewall rules were, if at all, from 9.2 to 10.1.