[Triumf-linux-managers] Is your OPENGL broken?

[Frederick Jones]

Hi Konstantin,
Thanks for your comments.
The use of nvidia drivers may explain why this problem
has not been seen very much.
The machines I have dealt with do not have nvidia
graphics (I wish they did).  They are just using
whatever cheap graphics chips are on the motherboard.
Cheers,
Fred

Konstantin Olchanski wrote:
> On Tue, Feb 14, 2012 at 01:17:25PM -0800, Frederick Jones wrote:
>> Back in early October, x.org issued a faulty update
>> to the X11 packages that causes OPENGL applications
>> to fail, at least on three SL 4.x systems here at
>> TRIUMF.  The fault is apparently with the X server
>> itself (file "Xorg").  The fix I used was to back up to the
>> previous rpms:
>>
>> xorg-x11-6.8.2-1.EL.69.i386.rpm
>> xorg-x11-Xdmx-... etc.
>>      -x11-Xnest-
>>      -x11-Xvfb-
>>
>> I am not sure if this affects any SL 5.X or 6.x systems
>> but would be curious to find out.
>>
>> If you have a desktop Linux machine, you can check it
>> by running "glxgears".  With the faulty X server it will
>> fail with an X protocol error.  If it works you will see
>> some spinning gears in a small window.
>> Also you can check the date on the file Xorg and see if
>> it was updated on around October 6 or so.
>>
> 
> 
> Fred - we have seen trouble with glxgears, too (through Femlab, G4 & co).
> 
> My solution is to install NVidia proprietary drivers which happen
> to install OpenGL libraries that seem to work just fine.
> 
> I have done this on desktop machines with NVidia graphics,
> on server machines with no graphics (only the Nvidia OpenGL libraries
> are used, kernel and x11 drivers are not used); but did not try
> this on any machine with ATI graphics (I would expect a conflict
> between ATI and NVidia proprietary drivers.
> 
> I do not know if the ATI proprietary drivers come with usable OpenGL libraries.
> 
>