Ubuntu – Steam: libGL error: No matching fbConfigs or visuals found libGL error: failed to load driver: swrast

driversnvidiasteam

If I click the desktop app of "Steam", nothing happens.

Running steam in terminal produces the following:

STEAM_RUNTIME is enabled automatically
Installing breakpad exception handler for appid(steam)/version(1474415843)
libGL error: No matching fbConfigs or visuals found
libGL error: failed to load driver: swrast

What's interesting is that if I change my GPU driver to xorg, it works perfectly.

What can I do to make it work? It stopped working after the latest steam update(36 hours ago).

I tried uninstalling nvidia – sudo apt-get remove nvidia* and re-installing the driver, but with no luck.

Best Answer

Ubuntu 16.04+ For anyone still getting same error, if you are using nvidia driver, sometimes you will see that libGL.so.1 points to ambiguous libGL provided by both mesa and nvidia. To test this, you can run this command

$ sudo ldconfig -p | grep -i gl.so

The output was something like:

    libwayland-egl.so.1 (libc6,x86-64) => /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libwayland-egl.so.1
    libftgl.so.2 (libc6,x86-64) => /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libftgl.so.2
    libcogl.so.20 (libc6,x86-64) => /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libcogl.so.20
    libQt5OpenGL.so.5 (libc6,x86-64) => /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libQt5OpenGL.so.5
    libQtOpenGL.so.4 (libc6,x86-64) => /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libQtOpenGL.so.4
    libQtOpenGL.so.4 (libc6) => /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libQtOpenGL.so.4
    libOpenGL.so.0 (libc6,x86-64) => /usr/lib/nvidia-378/libOpenGL.so.0
    libOpenGL.so (libc6,x86-64) => /usr/lib/nvidia-378/libOpenGL.so
    libGL.so.1 (libc6,x86-64) => /usr/lib/nvidia-378/libGL.so.1
    libGL.so.1 (libc6) => /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/mesa/libGL.so.1
    libGL.so.1 (libc6) => /usr/lib32/nvidia-378/libGL.so.1
    libGL.so (libc6,x86-64) => /usr/lib/nvidia-378/libGL.so
    libGL.so (libc6) => /usr/lib32/nvidia-378/libGL.so
    libEGL.so.1 (libc6,x86-64) => /usr/lib/nvidia-378/libEGL.so.1
    libEGL.so.1 (libc6) => /usr/lib32/nvidia-378/libEGL.so.1
    libEGL.so (libc6,x86-64) => /usr/lib/nvidia-378/libEGL.so
    libEGL.so (libc6) => /usr/lib32/nvidia-378/libEGL.so

Now I just needed to remove the library provided by mesa and everything worked perfectly.

$ sudo rm /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/mesa/libGL.so.1

Update: This issue no longer exists from Ubuntu 18.04 LTS.

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