Installation help

Thanks for clearing that up about dri/glx.. never really understood that.

I think libGL is not shipped with SL. It is libGLU (but I don't really understand the difference, so I would be grateful for some enlightenment!).

I am not sure if this was what you were suggesting, but I don't think it was SL that was not seeing the ATI glx, the module was just not installed properly: the ATI diagnostic program showed that the openGL renderer was mesa (i.e. the driver was not installed properly)

Still, this was a first for me trying to fix problems with an ATI card when I have never even used one before. Do you think there was an easier way of fixing the problem than I suggested?

It is incredibly hard to fix something that is broken. It starts with people taking the few clues a crashing program gives out to sort out why it might be doing so. As a whole ATI's drivers are a bit more difficult to work with than nvidia, especially for older cards. MESAGL will be present on the system, but the default openGL part of the driver must also be present, it is sometimes difficult to get this to happen depending on what you use to manage your distribution of linux.

libGL.so.1 is(or should) be installed as part of your linux distribution, it resides in /usr/lib (along with libGLU.so.1) I'm not sure why some of these dependencies must be shipped with SL as the system should have them. (Yeah I know because that is what SL was compiled against, but these are global libs, shouldn't matter)

dri can be present, or not. SL doesn't seem to mind(when used with nvidia drivers - ATI may require it) as SL itself won't be using(perhaps shouldn't be) using resouces from that module. The main problem I saw was it was trying to use mesagl, which just won't do well for this.

As for an easier way, there is always one. That is pretty much what linux is about, there are a dozen ways to do something and someone will always tell you a simpler one once you are done! I have to say that Ubuntu is one of the easier distros to use, pretty much apt-get and synaptic will take care of things.

Were you able to get it running eventually?

It was not for me (I use NVidia and have never had a major problem), I was trying to help Karyuu and Heliol.

It seems Karyuu managed to get it working by installing Ubuntu. Heliol, I think, may have given up.

I gave the alpha client a spin on Knoppix DapperDrake but got the window create error. I don't really fancy hacking about too much now I've got this linux variant running, so I'll check back in with Second Life maybe for beta.

Have fun !