[[!meta title="Portal on Linux: fix black screen without textures"]]
[[!meta author="rohieb"]]
[[!meta license="CC-BY-SA 3.0"]]
[[!img defaults size=x200]]

**Problem:** I just bought [Portal][] 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.

**Solution:** Searching the Steam forums resulted in nothing (who would have
guessed), but [this forum post][post] suggested to update Mesa to version 9.2
and install `libtxc-dxtn` or `libtxc-dxtn-s2tc0`. 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:

    aptitude install libtxc-dxtn-s2tc0 libtxc-dxtn-s2tc0:i386

After restarting Portal, the problem was gone, so I refrained from updating my
Mesa :-)

Before and after images (probably Copyright by Valve, but I consider this to be
fair use):
<div class="gallery">
[[!img testchmb_a_000000.jpg alt="Before" caption="Before installing
    `libtxc-dxtn-s2tc0`. Only faint lines are visible."]]
[[!img testchmb_a_000002.jpg alt="After" caption="After installing
    libtxc-dxtn-s2tc0, everything is great."]]
</div>

[Portal]: http://store.steampowered.com/app/400/
[post]: https://01.org/linuxgraphics/comment/358#comment-358

[[!tag quickfix howto Portal games Linux Linux_gaming Debian Debian_testing
    Mesa libtxc-dxtn]]