pages tagged Mesarohieb.namehttps://rohieb.name/blag/tag/Mesa/rohieb.nameikiwiki2013-11-09T04:24:49ZPortal on Linux: fix black screen without textureshttps://rohieb.name/blag/post/portal-on-linux-fix-black-screen-without-textures/rohieb
CC-BY-SA 3.0
2013-11-09T04:24:49Z2013-10-29T03:26:12Z
<p><strong>Problem:</strong> I just bought <a href="http://store.steampowered.com/app/400/">Portal</a> for Linux. When I start the game on my
AMD64 laptop with Debian testing, I only see black objects, and a few light
stripes in between. Everything else works, I can hear sound, I can interact with
objects, and I can look and around, in which case the stripes also move in the
right directions, so they seem to be speckles or reflections rendered on
objects, and only the textures are missing.</p>
<p><strong>Solution:</strong> Searching the Steam forums resulted in nothing (who would have
guessed), but <a href="https://01.org/linuxgraphics/comment/358#comment-358">this forum post</a> suggested to update Mesa to version 9.2
and install <code>libtxc-dxtn</code> or <code>libtxc-dxtn-s2tc0</code>. This packages were not
installed on my system, and the description for the package says that it is used
for texture compression, so it seems to be related. So I first tried to install
the i386 version:</p>
<pre><code>aptitude install libtxc-dxtn-s2tc0 libtxc-dxtn-s2tc0:i386
</code></pre>
<p>After restarting Portal, the problem was gone, so I refrained from updating my
Mesa <img src="https://rohieb.name/smileys/smile.png" alt=":-)" /></p>
<p>Before and after images (probably Copyright by Valve, but I consider this to be
fair use):</p>
<div class="gallery">
<table class="img"><caption>Before installing
`libtxc-dxtn-s2tc0`. Only faint lines are visible.</caption><tr><td><a href="https://rohieb.name/blag/post/portal-on-linux-fix-black-screen-without-textures/testchmb_a_000000.jpg"><img src="https://rohieb.name/blag/post/portal-on-linux-fix-black-screen-without-textures/x200-testchmb_a_000000.jpg" width="250" height="200" alt="Before" class="img" /></a></td></tr></table>
<table class="img"><caption>After installing
libtxc-dxtn-s2tc0, everything is great.</caption><tr><td><a href="https://rohieb.name/blag/post/portal-on-linux-fix-black-screen-without-textures/testchmb_a_000002.jpg"><img src="https://rohieb.name/blag/post/portal-on-linux-fix-black-screen-without-textures/x200-testchmb_a_000002.jpg" width="250" height="200" alt="After" class="img" /></a></td></tr></table>
</div>