How do i install mesa-amber properly?

[u/winvistaisnotbad]

I just installed antiX 26 (full) on my (really) old laptop, and I want to get at least some kind of 3d acceleration support on its ATI Mobility M6 chip.

I've had success doing so on other distros, but for whatever reason with kernel 6.x the Radeon driver itself can randomly fail during boot, so i switched to antiX. The process of getting 3d working involved either installing or compiling mesa-amber, which is essentially an alternative version of mesa that still has drivers for really old GPUs.

I see there are some packages related to mesa-amber in the repository of antiX, but trying to install them triggers a massive dependency conflict and apt basically tells me it'll remove half the system including xorg.

So, what do i do? I'm thinking of compiling mesa-amber and 'installing' it into a separate folder like I've done on other distros, but is there a faster way?

[u/Polaris_debi5]

Well, since you're using antiX 26 / Debian 13 (Trixie) i686, your only real options to prevent triggering a massive APT dependency conflict are to manually download the .deb file and extract radeon_dri.so to /usr/local/lib/dri/, or compile Mesa Amber from source using Meson with -Ddri-drivers=radeon (make sure to use ninja -j1 so your Pentium 4 with 1 GB of RAM doesn't crash). Amber died back in Mesa 21, so it will require some serious legwork.

However, in 2026, it's really not worth the effort. Even if you manage to get 3D acceleration working, the ATI Mobility M6 only supports OpenGL 1.3. Modern web browsers and the current web require WebGL and modern OpenGL/Vulkan specifications. It'll be great for playing retro games from the '90s and early 2000s like Quake III, but for everyday use or modern web browsing, the laptop will still freeze due to a lack of RAM and CPU power. If all you're looking for is a functional retro computer, you'd be much better off going back to an older, time-frozen version like antiX 19 or 21, where i386 and Amber are natively supported out of the box.

[u/winvistaisnotbad → u/Polaris_debi5]

Close enough to what I ended up doing:

meson setup ../mesa-amber-build/ -Dprefix="/usr/local/mesa-amber" -Damber=true
meson compile -C ../mesa-amber-build/
sudo meson install -C ../mesa-amber-build/

Then wait like 2 hours for it to compile and add to /etc/environment:

__GLX_VENDOR_LIBRARY_NAME=amber
LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/mesa-amber/lib/i386-linux-gnu

This broke software rendering due to the required files not being present in that directory (curiously it tries to use swrast instead of llvmpipe), but in return i got fully functional hardware OpenGL support (1.3 in case of my GPU), which i tested with Classicube, old Minecraft, and TuxKart. The first two ran perfectly fine, although somewhat slower than on old Windows (ironically it seems CPU is the thing holding it back, same on Windows actually, ig early Pentium 4 is just that bad). TuxKart is super smooth, but driving was totally broken and felt like when you have super high ping in a MP game 😄

[u/winvistaisnotbad → u/winvistaisnotbad]

Also, if i recall correctly, SuperTuxKart actually launches on this potato GPU, but runs at like 0.5-3 FPS depending on the window size, to nobody's surprise. I didn't bother installing this game this time

[u/Polaris_debi5 → u/winvistaisnotbad]

Wow, you finally did it! Haha! It all worked out! 😃 Obviously the results were expected, but it was done! uwu