I've downloaded Google earth from the Mandriva repository, and it just loads the image of the earth and stops there. How would I determine if this is related to my hardware especially video card? Here are the specs on my video card:

Vendor: ‎ATI Technologies Inc

Description: ‎RV350 AS [Radeon 9550]

Media class: ‎VGA compatible controller

Connection
Bus: ‎PCI

PCI domain: ‎0

Bus PCI #: ‎1

PCI device #: ‎0

PCI function #: ‎0

Vendor ID: ‎0x1002

Device ID: ‎0x4153

Sub vendor ID: ‎0x1002

Sub device ID: ‎0x0402

Misc
Module: ‎Card:ATI Radeon 9500 to Radeon X1050


I only have 640mb of ram, could that also be a problem? Thanks.

Which one of the two possible drivers are you using? radeon or fglrx? Try "grep -i driver /etc/X11/xorg.conf" or "/sbin/lsmod | egrep '(radeon|fglrx)'" to find out. I'm going to guess that Google earth will only work with the native hardware acceleration (and maybe 3d support) provided by the fglrx driver. Just a guess though. I'm not familiar with your distro, so I wouldn't be able to tell you how to get the fglrx driver.

Yeah, I was wondering that myself about the driver. In the past whenever I've tried to install the fglrx driver, Mandriva (or any other Linux distro I've tried)crashes after the required reboot, so on this last install of Mandriva 2009 a few months ago, I just gave up on intalling that driver. Thanks for your help.

Interesting, I thought I'd give that grep -i driver /etc/X11/xorg.conf a try and to my surprise here's the output:

Driver "kbd"
Driver "mouse"
Driver "fglrx"

why would you need to install google earth anymore/
http://maps.google.com.au/maps
what you get from installing that maps cant get? I cant rember any extra features but havent installed google earth for a while