Google Earth 4.2 with ATI - fglrx and XGL on OpenSuSE 10.3

Found somewhere in the net and adapted to OpenSuSE 10.3: after installing Google Earth doesn't start and eats up about 99% of your processor time.

The solution is to copy libGL.so.1 into the installation directory of Google Earth:

cd /opt/google-earth
sudo wget http://shanti.mojo.cc/docs/libGL.so.1

and you can enjoy google-earth


Found here.

Winter for GUI - when your X-Server freezes (your machine)

Right after using Xgl & Compiz with openSuSE 10.3 on Thukydides, a Samsung P35 XVM 1600 II with an ATi Mobility Radeon 9700, I experienced a wonderful winter: every time I ended a session and wanted to log in again, my computer froze - without the ability to switch even to a console. I tried different things in the settings, reinstalled the fglrx driver and so on, but it didn't help. Finally, after some research on google I found the following tip working for me (got it from here if you're interested in the source):
Look for the file kdmrc on your machine - on mine it is localized in /opt/kde3/share/config/kdm/. As Superuser look for the entry TerminateServer=false, change it to TerminateServer=true and reboot your machine. Trying it after an update failed, because the entry was positioned wrongly - obviously it must be at the end of the section [xcore-*. ...].

At least I don't have any problems with logging out and logging in any more - happy summertime.

Samsung P35, Xgl and Mobility Radeon 9700

Since I had a lot of trouble with these things, I'll post it here for others which may be as innocent as I was to those things.

Installing the drivers from the ATI repositories for 10.3 failed as posted before, so I installed version 8.40.4 with the Ati installer. Then I did an
aticonfig --initial
After that you need to reboot your machine.
Executing
fglrxinfo
and
fgl_glxgears
in a console you can check that the ATI driver is running (if there's no error message)
Then I tried to switch to Xgl via YaST which yielded serious problems. If you need to switch back to Xorg you can do that by executing
vi /etc/sysconfig/displaymanager
in a root shell and changing the entry Xgl back to Xorg (case sensitive).
Only after adding the "openSuSE 10.3 build service X11:Xorg" channel and installing compiz, compiz-emerald, opensuse-xgl-settings and executing the latter one in the graphical interface to enable xgl, everything worked well. Just to let you know, Xgl with compiz is awesome!