I had the same problem after installing Suse 10.1 Pro on a new AMD64x2 XPLIO machine and thought it was an ATI Radeon on motherboard graphics card problem. 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.