If you run Linux and are using the open source Intel graphics drivers, for their integrated graphics processors, have you noticed garbled / missing or white / corrupt textures? Do things just not look right, with the textures? This issue confounded me for an age, as I thought I must be the only one to experience this otherwise such a flaw would’ve been fixed in the mainline driver. I am using ‘xorg-x11-drv-intel-2.9.1-1.fc12.i686‘, the latest driver and nothing seemed to solve it.
I came across a fix though, whilst trying to install the Linux RTS game Spring. They even have the problem listed in their FAQ here (Under: Graphics: I use an ATI or Intel graphic card on Linux with Open-Source drivers, and the map is all white! Is there a solution?), although I didn’t see it for the longest time.
Follow the instructions there. Which in short is to install using your package manager the following two packages: ‘driconf and ‘mesa-libGL-devel’ (as it is named in Fedora Linux, there might be a slight naming difference in other distributions).
Once you’ve done this, you should find a nice graphical interface to configure a number of options to do with your graphics driver. You’ll find it under, ‘System -> Preferences -> Driconf‘. The specific option you need to change is, to enable the patented S3TC texture compression. I restate that you want this option turned on.
