A year ago I wrote a rather successful article on getting OpenGL right on a Gentoo Linux system. It was not straightforward to do and it I must confess the graphics setup didn't work anymore after a while. But still it appears to be of help to some people.

Now I switched to Arch Linux I had to get this right again. And it turned out to be so much simpler!

On some setups, like mine, the GUI font for Google Earth is incredibly small. There are some hints on the internet on how to fix that, but they are slightly outdated. This is more or less an update, using Google Earth 4.2.205.5730 . To set the fontsize to 12 execute:

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.