How to update OpenGL Driver on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS

Question

I recently upgraded to 14.04, then I installed steam, and TF2. I get this error message:

Could not find required OpenGL entry point 'glGetError'! Either your video card is unsupported, or your OpenGL driver needs to be updated.

Anyway, I know I need to update my OpenGL Driver, my question is how do I do it?

EDIT: I installed mesa and entered glxinfo | grep version into Terminal and got this,

New Edit: After looking into the first answer, I did all of the steps, and restarted my computer, when I launched steam on startup, I got the following error,

Solution 1

Be careful when using Charles Green's advice.

On the sudo apt-get upgrade step, you might see:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:oibaf/graphics-drivers
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
Calculating upgrade... Done
The following packages were automatically installed and are no longer
    required:
  account-plugin-windows-live libupstart1
Use 'apt-get autoremove' to remove them.
The following packages have been kept back:
  libdrm-dev libdrm-intel1 libdrm-intel1:i386 libdrm-nouveau2
  libdrm-nouveau2:i386 libdrm-radeon1 libdrm-radeon1:i386 libdrm2     libdrm2:i386
  libegl1-mesa libegl1-mesa-drivers libgbm1 libgl1-mesa-dev libgl1-mesa-dri
  libgl1-mesa-dri:i386 libgl1-mesa-glx libgl1-mesa-glx:i386 libglapi-mesa
  libglapi-mesa:i386 libgles1-mesa libgles2-mesa libosmesa6 libosmesa6:i386
  libva1 libwayland-egl1-mesa mesa-common-dev xserver-xorg-video-intel

The key part is that the upgrade I wanted to do didn't happen:

The following packages have been kept back:    

You will have to:

sudo apt-get install <list of packages kept back>

I ended up doing:

sudo apt-get install libegl1-mesa libegl1-mesa-drivers xserver-xorg-video-intel libgl1-mesa-dri libglapi-mesa 

For more information on this problem see: "The following packages have been kept back:" Why and how do I solve it?

Solution 2

It appears that you have a version of OpenGl, just not one new enough to run the application that you are looking for.

To get a slightly newer version of the OpenGl drivers, I would recommend the oibaf drivers from the launchpad website - these implement OpenGl 3.0, and are pretty stable.

To install open a terminal window and enter

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:oibaf/graphics-drivers
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

To remove, you can use ppa-purge

sudo apt-get install ppa-purge
sudo ppa-purge ppa:oibaf/graphics-drivers

Solution 3

I wrote my fix / answer here for this exact same issue:

Ubuntu 14.04 “could not find required OpenGL entry point 'glGetError'!"

Have a read

Comments

[Charles Green]

First you need to determine if you are using openGl. Open a terminal window, and enter glxinfo | grep version If this produces errors, you will need to sudo apt-get install mesa-utils and re-run the command. Please post the results into your question.

[Johnn]

@CharlesGreen I did what you said, and it is now in my question!

[Charles Green]

Thanks - future reference - you can copy the highlighted text (ctrl-shift-c) past it into the question, and then press ctrl-k while it's highlighted in the question to format the text as code...

[Johnn]

@CharlesGreen Intel® G33 x86/MMX/SSE2, and yes it is 32-bit. This desktop is fairly old

[Charles Green]

K - some people may not like my answer, but I'll post it below in a few seconds. I note that you also have some non-upgraded packages - is that by design?

[Johnn]

I'm not sure, I just updated yesterday so everything should be up-to date. @CharlesGreen

[bain]

What video card do you have? Can you post the output of glxinfo|grep render.*:

[Victor G.]

How about installing latest drivers from amd and nvidia nvidia.com/object/unix.html support.amd.com/en-us/download/desktop?os=Linux+x86

[cubecubed]

@Johnn Did you solve your problem? If not look at this it might help askubuntu.com/a/538907/215526

[karan]

askubuntu.com/questions/506349/… check this out. It worked for me

[Andrea Corbellini]

possible duplicate of Ubuntu 14.04 “could not find required OpenGL entry point 'glGetError'!"

[Johnn]

This didn't work, I'm getting a different error when I login to steam, i'll edit it into my post

[Alexander Kim]

If you install oibaf's ppa - you can't remove it with ppa-purge. Well, you can, but you will screw up your whole OS.

[Charles Green]

@Heihachi I've used ppa-purge a couple of times without issue - what happened on your system?

[GTRONICK]

After doing this, on Kubuntu 14.04.2 it worked perfect. But, i made a new fresh install of Kubuntu 14.04.3, and did the same process above, but this time, the game drops on FPS, 20-30, 50 fps max. Also the videos on Dragon Player go slow sometimes , as the FPS drop on Dota2. I'm doing the purge right now, and see what happens.

[Mina Michael]

I need to undo this, I'm getting weird glitches :(

[joseph]

@MinaMichael : look at Charles Green's post. He has a section on how to remove it.