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12.3.3 The Diagnosis Tool 3Ddiag

The diagnosis tool 3Ddiag allows veriﬁcation of the 3D conﬁguration in

SUSE LINUX. This is a command line tool that must be started in a termi-

nal. Enter 3Ddiag -h to list possible options for 3Ddiag.

To verify the XFree conﬁguration, the tool checks if the packages needed

for 3D support are installed and if the correct OpenGL library and GLX ex-

tension are used. Follow the instructions of 3Ddiag if you receive "failed"

messages. If everything is correct, you will only see "done" messages on the

screen.

12.3.4 OpenGL Test Utilities

For testing OpenGL, the program glxgears and games like tuxracer

and armagetron (packages have the same names) can be useful. If 3D

support has been activated, it should be possible to play these smoothly

on a fairly new computer. Without 3D support, these games would

run very slowly (slideshow effect). Use the glxinfo command to ver-

ify that 3D is active, in which case the output contains a line stating

direct rendering: Yes.

12.3.5 Troubleshooting

If the OpenGL 3D test results are negative (the games cannot be smoothly

played), use 3Ddiag to make sure no errors exist in the conﬁguration

("failed" messages). If correcting these does not help or if failed messages

have not appeared, take a look at the XFree86 log ﬁles.

Often, you will ﬁnd the line DRI is disabled in the XFree86 4.x ﬁle

/var/log/XFree86.0.log. The exact cause can only be discovered by

closely examining the log ﬁle — a task requiring some experience.

In such cases, no conﬁguration error exists, as this would have already

been detected by 3Ddiag. Consequently, at this point, the only choice is to

use the software rendering fallback of the DRI driver, which does not

provide 3D hardware support. You should also go without 3D support if

you get OpenGL representation errors or instability. Use SaX2 to disable 3D

support completely.

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12.3. OpenGL — 3D Conﬁguration