I'm trying to run Eschalon on a System 76 netbook but the game is very sluggish. I've tried setting everything to it's lowest settings but no luck. I've also tried installing lighter weight window managers as well as just launching from an xterm but still no luck. Is there a way to run the game for a resource limited platform like a netbook?

It sounds like your video driver implements OpenGL in software - it isn't using hardware acceleration.

The specs I saw says that netbook has "Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 950".

From what I saw on Intel's site, this graphics core supports OpenGL.
http://www.intel.com/products/chipsets/gma950/index.htm

You'll need to obtain an accelerated driver to enable full OpenGL support. I'm not sure if one exists for Linux or not. I've only ever used NVidia cards on Linux because they're so well supported.

The GMA950 runs the game horribly no matter what OS/Driver combo you pair it with. The only intel GMA video I've seen have decent performance is the 4500, and I'd wager it was the faster processor that was making up the difference.

It's really annoying how intel touts their GMA chips as a capable gaming platform when that couldn't be further from the truth.

A netbook with the GMA500 might actually be ok because the graphics core isn't actually made by intel, and if you can find an nVidia ION based netbook it should offer good performance. I don't know if they have linux derivatives of either though.