Have installed GE v5 successfully

The issue with some ATI card acceleration/libraries causing the splash screen to hang during initialization can be fixed with the following patch:

cp /usr/lib/libGL.so.1.2 ~/google-earth/libGL.so.1

If you prefer to backout the google supplied library:

cd ~/google-earth

mv libGLU.so.1 libGLU.so.1_old