Debian, fgl_glxgears: Using GLX_SGIX_pbuffer… Segmentation fault

Bogdan — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 16:17:34 +0000

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-assistant, 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.

Autarchy of the Private Cave » ATI

Debian, fgl_glxgears: Using GLX_SGIX_pbuffer… Segmentation fault