Debian, fgl_glxgears: Using GLX_SGIX_pbuffer… Segmentation fault
1st October 2008
If you get Segmentation fault when trying to run fgl_glxgears in your Debian desktop environment, most often this would mean that 3D acceleration isn’t enabled.
For the case of ATI (and ATI Mobility) Radeon series, the easiest procedure would be (doing all as root, or prepending sudo to all commands):
- aptitude update, to ensure you’ve got the list of latest packages
- aptitude install fglrx-driver fglrx-control fglrx-kernel-src, for the actual driver; I also installed fglrx-atieventsd and fglrx-glx (these are driver-recommended packages)
- aptitude install module-assisstant, required for building the kernel module
- module-assistant prepare, to verify that you have everything needed for the module build procedure
- module-assistant update
- module-assistant auto-install fglrx, to build and install the fglrx kernel module
- depmod -a
- modprobe fglrx, to load the fglrx kernel module
- aticonfig ––initial, to configure ATI’s device section in /etc/X11/xorg.conf (for more options, see aticonfig ––help)
- reboot
That should make your ATI hardware work as expected, and make fgl_glxgears show gears again.
If everything went fine, then your movies will play smoother 
, and the output of fglrxinfo will look similar to
display: :0.0 screen: 0
OpenGL vendor string: ATI Technologies Inc.
OpenGL renderer string: ATI MOBILITY RADEON X600
OpenGL version string: 2.1.7769 Release
This procedure should be also possible for the latest ATI-provided installer-generated Debian packages (as described elsewhere), but I decided to stick to the repository version – this requires no extra tweaking.
For much more information, see the ATI Debian Installation Guide.
This post is based on the iwanabeguru’s response at Linux Forums.
