Mesa drivers

Hello everyone.

I’m new to Netrunner and it’s a fantastic distribution.

The only problem I’ve had is when I try to run some of my Games, I realized that the Mesa drivers were pretty outdated.

I looked in the repositories and it turns out that there wasn’t a newer version, even in the Netrunner backports.

However it turns out that there is a newer version in the official Debian backports.

So my questions are:

  1. Could someone from the Netrunner team add the newer mesa drivers from the official Debian backports to their own backports?
  2. If that’s not possible, how do I go on to install the necessary packages from the official Debian backports to my Netrunner installation?

Thank you.

Yes, just enable the debian backports repository in the sources list.

By default when you want to install anything from the debian backports repository with apt-get you need to give it the argument -t jessie-backports .
One example to upgrade every package available in jessie-backports execute the following

sudo apt-get -t jessie-backports upgrade

If you prefer the graphical way you can force versions in synaptic aswell to the version coming from jessie-backports.

What I did was:

sudo apt-get -t jessie-backports install libglapi-mesa sudo apt-get -t jessie-backports install libgl1-mesa-dev libgl1-mesa-dri

Now I have Mesa 12.0.4 with OpenGL 4.3

One caveat: the application has to specifically ask for OpenGL 4 - otherwise it will be locked on OpenGL 3.

For example, when using GLFW:

[code] glfwWindowHint (GLFW_CONTEXT_VERSION_MAJOR, 4);

glfwWindowHint (GLFW_CONTEXT_VERSION_MINOR, 3);
glfwWindowHint (GLFW_OPENGL_FORWARD_COMPAT, GL_TRUE);
glfwWindowHint (GLFW_OPENGL_PROFILE, GLFW_OPENGL_CORE_PROFILE);

[/code]

With that:

Thank you leszek this solved my problem!