Q4OS Forum

Tolkem

Member

Registered: 2019-10-06

Posts: 487

Updating Mesa to (almost) latest

EDITED by Admin: The proposed procedure could entail various type of unexpected errors. Please read notification below https://www.q4os.org/forum/viewtopic.ph … 755#p18755

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Hi everyone! Hope you're all having a nice life!

A couple of months ago I updated & upgraded the Mesa drivers on Buster/Q4OS, currently, 18.3.6 to 20.0.7 which got later updated to 20.1.5.

glxinfo | grep Mesa
client glx vendor string: Mesa Project and SGI
OpenGL core profile version string: 3.3 (Core Profile) Mesa 20.1.5
OpenGL version string: 3.1 Mesa 20.1.5
OpenGL ES profile version string: OpenGL ES 3.1 Mesa 20.1.5

I used MX ahs (Advanced Hardware Support) repo and everything works just fine, in fact, they work great I haven't had any issues whatsoever in the 2 months or so since I did it. If you'd like to do the same, follow these steps;
1. Create a file_repo.list in /etc/apt/sources.list.d/

sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list.d/mx-ahs.list

2. Add these lines in the file.

#MX-ahs repo for updating & upgrading mesa. 
deb http://mxrepo.com/mx/repo/ buster ahs

3. Update sources

sudo apt-get update

4. You're most likely to get a GPG key error, to solve that, download this file https://github.com/MX-Linux/checkaptgpg and make it executable, it's just a script that checks apt GPG keys, download missing ones and install them. You need to run the script with sudo:

sudo ./checkaptgpg

Now update your sources again and all should be fine.
Once you've done that the new mesa pkgs will be available for install. You can:
1. Install mesa pkgs only if you know exactly which ones those are, they're about 20.
2. Upgrade mesa pkgs along with the system by running in a terminal:

sudo apt-get upgrade

This is the easiest way and in case you wonder, it won't upgrade your entire system but mesa pkgs, FFmpeg and a few firmware pkgs too, so it's a safe procedure, however, I do recommend to back up your system before proceeding, just in case. It's around 70mb give or take. This is how I did it 2 months ago and like I said before haven't had a single issue, not a single one! I haven't even disabled it.

EDIT: It's been some months since I wrote this and today while re-reading it realized that I'd missed step 4, so I edited the post and added it. Sorry everyone for the inconvenience.
P.S.: Haven't had any issues whatsoever so far

Last edited by Tolkem (2020-12-24 16:03)

q4osteam

Q4OS Team

Registered: 2015-12-06

Posts: 4,535

Website

Re: Updating Mesa to (almost) latest

Warning before adding an alien repository. Thanks for the tip, however we have to add emphatic warning. We discourage regular users from adding an incomplete part of MX repositories into Q4OS, such repositories could be incompatible with Q4OS in some way. It would be appropriate for testing, but not for production use. Various types of unexpected errors may arise sooner or later, so you must keep it in mind and be absolutely sure what you are doing, if you add some strange repositories into Q4OS.

The default Debian Mesa version is rock stable and optimized to run within the Debian/Q4OS systems. Please be really careful to make such a change.