blag/post/portal-on-linux-fix-black-screen-without-textures.mdwn

   1 [[!meta title="Portal on Linux: fix black screen without textures"]]
   2 [[!meta author="rohieb"]]
   3 [[!meta license="CC-BY-SA 3.0"]]
   4 [[!img defaults size=x200]]
   5
   6 **Problem:** I just bought [Portal][] for Linux. When I start the game on my
   7 AMD64 laptop with Debian testing, I only see black objects, and a few light
   8 stripes in between. Everything else works, I can hear sound, I can interact with
   9 objects, and I can look and around, in which case the stripes also move in the
  10 right directions, so they seem to be speckles or reflections rendered on
  11 objects, and only the textures are missing.
  12
  13 **Solution:** Searching the Steam forums resulted in nothing (who would have
  14 guessed), but [this forum post][post] suggested to update Mesa to version 9.2
  15 and install `libtxc-dxtn` or `libtxc-dxtn-s2tc0`. This packages were not
  16 installed on my system, and the description for the package says that it is used
  17 for texture compression, so it seems to be related. So I first tried to install
  18 the i386 version:
  19
  20     aptitude install libtxc-dxtn-s2tc0 libtxc-dxtn-s2tc0:i386
  21
  22 After restarting Portal, the problem was gone, so I refrained from updating my
  23 Mesa :-)
  24
  25 Before and after images (probably Copyright by Valve, but I consider this to be
  26 fair use):
  27 <div class="gallery">
  28 [[!img testchmb_a_000000.jpg alt="Before" caption="Before installing
  29     `libtxc-dxtn-s2tc0`. Only faint lines are visible."]]
  30 [[!img testchmb_a_000002.jpg alt="After" caption="After installing
  31     libtxc-dxtn-s2tc0, everything is great."]]
  32 </div>
  33
  34 [Portal]: http://store.steampowered.com/app/400/
  35 [post]: https://01.org/linuxgraphics/comment/358#comment-358
  36
  37 [[!tag quickfix howto Portal games Linux Linux_gaming Debian Debian_testing
  38     Mesa libtxc-dxtn]]