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Ubuntu 12.10 with legacy AMD ATI cards to play SL

Darren Scorpio

By Darren Scorpio,
in Second Life Viewer

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Darren Scorpio

Darren Scorpio

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Not sure if this is in the right place, mods please feel free to move it to the correct spot.


If you have an AMD ATI graphic card Radeon HD2000 - HD4000 you'll find that your card is no longer supported. The last legacy driver provided by AMD is 12.6 which as you'll find does not support kernel 3.5 nor Xorg 1.13 both of which are in Ubuntu 12.10. So you currently have two options, stay on Ubuntu 12.04 and happily play SL with the last provided drivers or update to Ubuntu 12.10 and use the open source drivers which don't work for SL (at least I have not found a way yet).

 

Here is the workaround for those who want to update Ubuntu.

After you've installed Ubuntu update your system first. Then install fglrx drivers the following way which will do two things, 1) it will downgrade xorg to 1.12 (NOTE: downgradeng xorg may break some unity functionality), and 2) it will apply a patch that will allow the 12.6 legacy driver to work on kernel 3.5

 

Type the following commands:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:makson96/fglrx
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo apt-get install fglrx-legacy


This PPA is provided by Tomasz Makarewiczlegacy here

Reboot. Now you can install and run Second Life.

If you find that SL still does not run then apply the solution first reported by Jenni Darkwatch here

Type

ln -s libfontconfig.so.1.4.4 libfontconfig.so.1

from the Second Life directory.

 

Option 2: If you want to play around with the newer open source drivers with OpenGL support.

The latest open source drivers have OpenGL 3.0 support and some people have reported to getting better performance than with proprietary drivers. However I personally have not gotten SL to run with the driver but if you are up to the challenge and get SL to run with it please post here so I can update this post.

To run the latest drivers with OpenGL support we have to first update our kernel to 3.6. Pick up the latest kernel from the Ubuntu Mainline Kernel PPA  which as of this morning is 3.6.3. Download all 4 deb packages according to your architecture and save them on a folder named linux3.6 (or something distinctive) in your downloads directory.

Type:

cd ~/Downloads/linux3.6

sudo dpkg -i *.deb

Let it do its magic and when done reboot.

After reboot type:

glxinfo | grep -i opengl

You should see something like this:

OpenGL vendor string: X.Org
OpenGL renderer string: Gallium 0.4 on AMD RV730
OpenGL version string: 3.0 Mesa 9.0
OpenGL shading language version string: 1.30

 

And that's it. If anyone gets Second Life to work with the open source drivers please let me know how :D

 

Hope someone finds this helpful. Have a great day.

 

 

 

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  • 4 weeks later...
Qie Niangao

Qie Niangao

Posted
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That's nice, but that's also what Darren told you to do. Twice.

I pinged Oz about this libfontconfig bug at his user group yesterday:

[2012/11/26 07:22]  Qie Niangao: Maybe a bit off-topic, but: Wondering if STORM-1854 (libfontconfig on recent Linux) is getting any attention for the Linden viewer. I've been deceiving the crash statistics for months by possibly giving the false impression that the viewer actually runs as packaged on Ubuntu 12.10.[2012/11/26 07:22]  Office Orb: http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/STORM-1854 [#STORM-1854] Linux Viewer crashes on startup after update to Fontconfig 2.9.0 [2012/11/26 07:23]  Oz Linden: I don't believe anyone is working on that... the version of debian that we build on doesn't have that yet, and that's the target[2012/11/26 07:24]  Qie Niangao: I suspect it's related to VWR-28748 ... so the workaround generates pretty hideous results. But... it's okay for me, but not so good for any new Ubuntu user who doesn't pick the older, LTS version.[2012/11/26 07:24]  Oz Linden: there are a bunch of linux build improvements in the pipeline, though, including getting up to a more recent gcc.... I'll ask the folks who did those if they looked a that library[2012/11/26 07:24]  Qie Niangao: cool. thanks!

 

So... I wouldn't hold my breath for a proper fix in the Linden viewer. I haven't checked if the new Firestorm fixes this correctly yet, but I believe there's been a new Firestorm release since it was promised in the then-next release (so probably).

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Skully Sabra

Skully Sabra

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Posted

I have been playing SecondLife on Ubuntu 12.10 for a couple of months with no problem. You all should have fun as I have, so here's how I do to get all of viewers running. I installed 3D scene graph from Ubuntu Software Center. Yes, I was not sure which one to install and chose all 3D scene graph related files. Let me know if it helps you. Yes, I installed debian and fonts etc etc as others suggested in the forums. To answer your question how I figured this out, I typed "Virtual Reality" in the Ubuntu Software Center search. Be sure to reboot after install.
-Wild Newbie **Only uploaded images may be used in postings**://ubuntuforums.org/images/smilies/guitar.gif" border="0" alt="" title="Guitar" />

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