America's Army - Fixing GL error on Linux

Here are some specifics of how I got AA to work on my machine... after the dreaded "GL_EXT_bgra not supported" error.

% ./armyops

GL_EXT_bgra not supported - bailing out.


History:

Exiting due to error 

It turns out that a recent update overwrote the NVidia GL libraries (which were from the latest version).

First, check this:

% glxinfo | grep direct

If you get 'direct rendering: Yes' then you should be ok, but if it is No, then you need to reinstall your NVidia drivers.

Then as root, run this:

# nvidia-installer --sanity

This will perform a sanity check of the installed drivers and libraries. It was this that alerted me to the problem. If this doesn't check out all ok, do this:

# nvidia-installer -a -f --update

That will force an upgrade of the drivers, and make sure the right ones are installed.

(The above assumes you have set up XFree86Config-4 properly btw.)

Now restart X, and you should have the right drivers and libraries... Test with:

% glxinfo | grep direct
% glxinfo | grep GL_EXT_bgra

You should have both there now.

But there is still one more problem. For some reason, the installer puts libraries in /usr/lib/tls. So long as this is there, AA will not work. As per another suggestion in this forum, if you rename this directory to something else (eg. /usr/lib/tls_orig) then AA should work.

This last step bothers me, as I'm not sure why they put stuff in that dir in the first place. But it does seem to make it work...

Good luck!