google earth
 

I am running mandriva 2008, and I installed "Google-Earth", but every time I try and run it it shuts down my session and restarts? I have tried installing it from the "menu" and also from a download and executing the "bin" file?

What is your video card? Google Earth requires 3d acceleration, meaning you need both a good card and the appropriate driver.

Not sure what video card is but it use to run without any problem on SLED, and also runs ok in WinXP, and it use to run on this laptop before I reinstalled Mandriva. I had problems getting it to run in Gnome so reinstalled OS and used KDE, and it worked ok, but had a problem and had to reinstall OS again, still using KDE, but now it won't work?

Make sure that you have the correct driver for your card installed. It would be good to know what you vid card is. If you have an nvidia card but don't have the proprietary driver installed, and are only running the free driver, you won't have any 3d, and what you describe will happen if you try and run any 3d app's, games etc. For an ATI card, I believe that both the free and proprietary drivers support 3d nowdays (could be wrong)

What is the output when you type glxinfo | grep rendering in a konsole/terminal?