Blender 4 and Bonsai on old Linux laptop with OpenGL 4.2 (solved)
I just wanted to share with you the solution for this problem, because maybe it is useful also for someone else.
I have an old laptop that i use at home and i usually use it to explore IfcOpenShell and Bonsai (ex BlenderBIM) script capabilities. I installed Debian 12 on it because, equipped with SSD and 4 GB of RAM, it is faster than the PC i have to use at work that is 2 years old and equipped with Win11, a dedicated graphic card, etc... of course, i mean faster for doing normally office work (word editing, web, etc ...) and if i compared them for graphic work there would be no match but for normally work, my old laptop works like a charm.
I use this old laptop also to test my Bonsai scripts and i used to set on it the "Live development environment" in order to contribute to the development (at least, i try to do it :-) ).
Anyway, it worked fine until about 2 months ago when Bonsai started needed Blender 4.2 ... the problem for me was that Blender > 4 doesn't run on my old laptop because it requires minimum OpenGL 4.3 and the latest driver available for my laptop is OpenGL 4.2.
So i tried to do my best in order to run Blender 4.2 on my old laptop:
- update the OS to the latest version (Debian 12)
- update graphic card driver to the last available version (unfortunately OpenGL 4.2)
- compile Blender from source
- compile Blender from source with the command
make lite(this command, instead of normalmake, builds Blender with the absolute minimum amount of features enabled) - a lot of googling ...
but unfortunately nothing worked :-(
So i asked to ChatGPT (i actually don't use it so much) and it helped me suggesting me to run Blender with this command
MESA_GL_VERSION_OVERRIDE=4.3 MESA_GLSL_VERSION_OVERRIDE=430 /path/to/blender4.2/blender
This command overrides the OpenGL and GLSL (OpenGL Shading Language) reported to Blender, in particular:
MESA_GL_VERSION_OVERRIDE=4.3:
This environment variable tells Mesa to report OpenGL version 4.3 instead of the actual version supported by the hardwareMESA_GLSL_VERSION_OVERRIDE=430:
This variable sets the GLSL version to 430, which corresponds to the OpenGL 4.3 specification.
It ensures that shaders written for GLSL 430 can be compiled and run, even if the underlying hardware does not natively support it.
This is obviously a workaround and maybe, in the future, there will be problems, but it worked !!!!
I hope that this is useful also for somebody else because it actually helped me a lot!
Cheers,
Massimo
and 2 others.