GNet Solutions » GNU/Linux Administration

I downloaded Left4Dead2 from the Steam store since they offered it for free on Christmas. After downloading and installing I went to play the game, only to get an error:

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

I found a workaround on the steam community website.

Install the libc6-dev package¶

sudo apt-get install libc6-dev-i386

Now paste the following into the terminal. There are 2 files that need to be downloaded onto your computer and then compile one of them. The two files can be found either on the steam community website, or on this page (I have included them for posterity).

cd
gcc -fPIC -DPIC -O2 -m32 -c strstr.c 
ld -m elf_i386 -shared -o strstr.so strstr.o
mkdir ~/bin
cd bin/
chmod +x ~/bin/hl2debug

Now paste the following into the terminal. It will open your .profile in a simple text editor. If you're using something other than Ubuntu, replace 'gedit' with the name of your text editor. For example on Xubuntu this would be 'leafpad';

cd ~ && gedit .profile

Paste these 2 lines at the bottom of the file. Save it, then close the editor.

export PATH=$HOME/bin:$PATH
export GAME_DEBUGGER="hl2debug" 

Log out of your current session and then log back in to load everything up.

Start steam through the terminal using the following command:

steam

I've tested this with CS:S and TF2, both work. It has been recommended elsewhere on the Steam forums to run the games with the -novid and -nojoy flags. The games also default to the highest graphics settings when first run. You'll probably want to turn those down if you're on an old card.

Resources¶

• http://steamcommunity.com/app/221410/discussions/5/864958451285122301/