Ubuntu – Win10 linux subsystem libGL error: No matching fbConfigs or visuals found libGL error: failed to load driver: swrast

driversnvidiaopenglwindows-subsystem-for-linux

I'm not really asking a question, but this ___ website won't allow me to do this any other way.

I ran into a problem today using GTK under Win10's Linux subsystem (specifically Ubuntu 18.04). The error msg was:

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

Someone else ran into this while using Steam, and there are some answers here: Steam libGL error. The second answer, "Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) has same error", is the one that led me to the solution, however that answer didn't work out of the box.

Their answer concerns a directory /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/mesa/libGL.so.1. That directory does not exist in my system, but I'll provide the solution that did work on my stem in my answer (to myself).

I realize this is a terribly clumsy way to answer this question. However, I felt it was important to answer it, because it took me a lot of fiddling around to find an answer that worked for me, and others may have the same issue. I couldn't leave an answer on the original question, because it's been closed; and I couldn't comment on the answer that led me to the solution, because I don't have sufficient reputation. And I couldn't post to the meta-questions either. Can you say "Catch-22"? I knew you could.

Best Answer

Add LIBGL_ALWAYS_INDIRECT variable to /etc/bash.bashrc solved my error.

export LIBGL_ALWAYS_INDIRECT=1

Don't know what's the actual usage. But maybe useful, because XLauch confg says it requires this.

My error occurs when invoke emacs from wsl2, and display in XLauch (vcxsrv):

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

I find the solution according to:

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – Problems with libGl, fbConfigs, swrast through each update

The swrast thing is the software renderer. That means it's not finding the hardware driver for your graphics card. There are a bunch of libGL libraries installed and a bunch of of symbolic links to those libraries. To see these run this from the shell:

find /usr -iname "*libGL.so*" -exec ls -l -- {} +

Now the probable cause of your problem is that installing graphics drivers sometimes break these symbolic links. (Specifically /usr/local/lib/libGL.so.1.2.0 is likely to be either the wrong lib or a sym link to the wrong link) (N.B. I wrote this a while ago. libGL.so.1.2.0 was the current gl version it may be something else now).

To work out what library the OpenGL programs are trying to run you can turn on a bit of verbosity and run a simple OpenGL program. You can verify this using the standard OpenGL test program:

LIBGL_DEBUG=verbose glxgears

Hopefully that will fail in the same way as SFML. With LIBGL_DEBUG it should tell you what OpenGL library it's trying to load. Furthermore the lib it will be trying to load will almost certainly be /usr/local/lib/libGL.so.1.2.0 (Edit: This was the standard OpenGL library on my machine at the time I answered this. It may well be some other version on your machine now).

So the solution (in this case) is to make sure that /usr/local/lib/libGL.so.1.2.0 is a symbolic link pointing at the right OpenGL library. In my case I have the Nvidia 3.40 driver so I ran:

ln -s /usr/lib/nvidia-340/libGL.so.1 /usr/local/lib/libGL.so.1.2.0

But you'll want to point it at the OpenGL lib that is appropriate for you (listed in the first find command).

In summary: installing (proprietary) graphics drivers can break the symbolic links used for OpenGL libs. To solve this problem manually fix the symbolic links (fix /usr/local/lib/libGL.so.1.2.0 first).

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

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.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – Problems with libGl, fbConfigs, swrast through each update

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

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