It's been a real pain to enable graphics hardware acceleration on my 3.5 year old IBM Thinkpad T42, containing an ATI Radeon 9600 (Mobility). The binary drivers by ATI are just plain crap, causing insane instability to the system (kernel panics everywhere). I called it a day and continued working without acceleration. But applications like Google Earth are a real pain to use like this, so something inside me shouted to get this right.