Sunday, June 24, 2012

Debian Linux with 3D graphics in vmware fusion 4.1

Joostlek has a nice post about enabling 3D graphics in linux guests on vmware.  I followed this same post for installing 3D graphics support for my Debian wheezy desktop.  I wanted to see the gnome shell in action after I heard so many (*bad*) things about it!

I had to install some extra packages and build dependencies for Mesa and if you also installed wheezy from net installer then these "extra" steps will be useful for you. Also his post describes building it on Ubuntu. These two points are the only difference from his post. I have vmware fusion 4.1.3 running on a 13" macbook pro.

Following packages are from above post


sudo apt-get install autoconf libtool xutils-dev xorg-dev flex bison libx11-xcb-dev libxcb-glx0-dev g++ git

And here are the extra packages that were missing in my net installer


  •  sudo aptitude install  libxcb-dri2-0-dev
  •  sudo aptitude install  libxcb-xfixes0 libxcb-xfixes0-dev
  •  sudo aptitude install llvm
  •  sudo aptitude install libxml2 libxml2-dev
  •  sudo aptitude install python-libxml2
  •  sudo aptitude install build-essential


You also have to install build dependencies for Mesa. Check the Debian How to build Mesa page.


  •  sudo apt-get build-dep mesasudo apt-get build-dep mesa


Rest of the steps remain the same as in above post.  If you are using Debian wheezy after 21st June 2012 then you do not need to download a new kernel. DRM is enabled for your kernel. Just skip that step.

After the restart, I could log into gnome shell. The default leave a lot to desire. So I had to tweak my desktop for next  hour or so.  Here is the screenshot of my Debian wheezy  desktop running gnome-3 shell






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Maira Gall