Comment 5 for bug 150942

I briefly referted the status of this bug to New, intending to re-describe what Tuomas saw, motivated by the fact that today, in 2010, I am still being affected by the same problem. However, I realise that since I have just reverted to ubuntu 8.10 (from Koala) in an attempt to fix a different problem (python-visual is broken in koala, and my display driver is broken in jaunty) that I'm unlikely to be able to supply test information on a sufficiently recent system for any developer to care.

All Tuomas was saying, was that a vncserver, as it is an X server, must be able to do anything that an X server has to do. One of those things is to be able to deal with open GL requests, if it is to be able to run programs that use open GL. This is nothing to do with desktop effects. Turn them all off. Forget about them. Instead start a vncserver, eg;

sudo apt-get install tightvncserver
vncserver -localhost :1

and then connect to the X server:

sudo apt-get install vncviewer (I may have misremembered the name of the vncclient package)
vncviewer :1 (oops, may have misremembered the name of this binary too)

and then within the viewer, launch glxgears.

Tuomas was pointing out that the last step above (glxgears) will FAIL, because the X server binary supplied with 8.10 (and possibly also later versions, I can no longer test them) was compiled without the option to support openGL.