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[TheNut]

If you're a Linux developer, please take note below.

I've been receiving reports from Ubuntu users (specifically, Jaunty 9.04) that my opengl apps have been crashing. After installing it and doing some researching, I found out Ubuntu, as well as some other latest distros, are using experimental drivers. Apparently Xorg and Intel are revamping the way graphics are rendered in X11 and thought it would be a cool idea to release these new drivers out into the wild and get all sorts of lovely feedback, or rather a large mob of angry users. Apparently this has been going on for a while too, with certain older drivers still causing the issue as well.

The problem in my case was a seg fault generated whenever I cleared buffers.
glClear(GL_COLOR_BUFFER_BIT | GL_DEPTH_BUFFER_BIT | GL_STENCIL_BUFFER_BIT);

Apparently, the latest Intel drivers bomb when you bitwise mask a series of clear calls. To resolve it, I had to make 3 individual clear calls. This one fix seems to have resolved my issues. A pity, but I would recommend making this fix to improve Linux support for the time being.

[geon]

Yup, the new Intel drivers are still buggy. Blender stopped working for me, so I had to run it in software mode.

But in the long term, it is a good thing. Intel have been reorganizing the driver code to better fit in the modern desktop environment. X11 is a pile of stinking crap, so any innovation here is badly needed.