Blender segfaults at startup

[tobiasBora]

First, thanks for this up to date repository. Unfortunately, I can't make it work:

$ nix run blender-bin#blender_3_1
intern/ghost/intern/GHOST_WindowX11.cpp:206: X11 glXChooseVisual() failed, verify working openGL system!
initial window could not find the GLX extension
Writing: /run/user/1000/blender.crash.txt
Segmentation fault (core dumped)

Any idea what I may be missing?

[lucasew]

nixGL

[tobiasBora]

Thanks, I thought nixGL was not useful for users running NixOs. I tried to do that, but for some reasons it does not work:

$ nix-channel --add https://github.com/guibou/nixGL/archive/main.tar.gz nixgl && nix-channel --update nixgl
$ nix-shell -p '(import <nixgl> {}).auto.nixGLDefault'
$ nixGL nix run blender-bin#blender_3_1
Read prefs: /home/leo/.config/blender/3.1/config/userpref.blend
intern/ghost/intern/GHOST_WindowX11.cpp:206: X11 glXChooseVisual() failed, verify working openGL system!
initial window could not find the GLX extension
Writing: /run/user/1000/blender.crash.txt
/nix/store/garwhsd29qn28i056n2sak26sflmf8mg-nixGL/bin/nixGL: line 5: 2320413 Segmentation fault      (core dumped) "$@"

I guess I've done something stupid, maybe nixGL does not work with nix run directly, or I need to do something special to ensure versions matches? I tried to read the documentation but it's not obvious to me.

[tobiasBora]

Ok, so the solution was to read the value of nixpkgs inside the blender expression and ask nixGL to use it:

$ nix run --override-input nixpkgs nixpkgs/nixos-21.05 --impure github:guibou/nixGL -- nix run blender-bin#blender_3_1

Looks quite complicated as it means that I need to know the nixpkgs version used by my softwares, and in some cases (for instance for tools built without nix or for which I lost the derivation), I'm not even sure which nixpkgs version I should use.

I'm not sure why, but other distributions does not run in such hassle, I can run basically any software I like. It would be great if NixOs had ways to avoid such issues...