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I have a Ubuntu 11.10 on Toshiba Satellite L30-11G with Radeon Xpress 200M graphics card. Is it possible for me to get WebGL enabled on Chrome and if it is; how?

http://get.webgl.org/ says

Hmm. While your browser seems to support WebGL, it is disabled or unavailable. If possible, please ensure that you are running the latest drivers for your video card.

lspci | grep VGA

01:05.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc RC410 [Radeon Xpress 200M]

System Info > Graphics

Driver: Gallium 0.4 on ATI RC410 Experience: Fallback

Not sure if these are useful?

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  • what version of ubuntu are you using? Have you activated any graphics drivers in the Additional Drivers window? if you have - which one?
    – fossfreedom
    Dec 13, 2011 at 20:59
  • I have no additional drivers available
    – Vili
    Dec 14, 2011 at 7:23

2 Answers 2

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The answer here will help a little with this question: How do I browse a website that uses WebGL?

But to have WebGL support you need:

  • Video Card that supports OpenGL ES 2.0 which is the base for WebGL. If your video card supports OpenGL 2.0+ then you already have OpenGL ES 2.0 support and so WebGL will work fine although I recommend video cards that support OpenGL 3.0+ since it is more close to the time that OpenGL ES 2.0 came out.

  • Browser that supports WebGL. For the time being, the best Desktop browsers for this are Google Chrome and Firefox. I am a Firefox users but i have to say that, up to Firefox 10, Chrome still has better support for WebGL. In renders faster. More FPS in general.

Since Firefox 4.x and Chrome 9 you have support for WebGL. Not very good but at least it has support. This was a long time ago. Right now there is Firefox 10 and Chrome 17. Both of which have superior support for WebGL.

You can select the Stable, Beta or Dev version you want from Chrome here: http://dev.chromium.org/getting-involved/dev-channel

You can select the Beta or Dev version you want from Firefox here: https://launchpad.net/~mozillateam/+archive/firefox-next

For what I have seen the Radeon Xpress 200M has support for OpenGL 2.0. The chipset RC410 mentions support for OpenGL 2.0. So you should be fine there. There is also no need to add command line parameters to Chrome or Firefox. Just install the latest (Firefox 10+ or Chrome 17+) and done.

For the drivers I do recommend using the proprietary drivers from the Additional Drivers application. Just open Dash and type Drivers. That should show you the Additional Drivers app.

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If you have the following graphics cards, WebGL is unsupported and is disabled by default:

  • NVIDIA GeForce FX Go5200
  • AMD/ATI
  • Intel: Mesa drivers earlier than 7.9

If not, then check for and install all updates.

Launch Chrome with google-chrome --enable-webgl --allow-file-access-from-files --ignore-gpu-blacklist

Navigate to http://get.webgl.org/

You should see a rotating cube.

I would not recommend running Chrome in this state all the time, wait for better compatability. In the mean time, you could add it to the quicklist, like so:

  1. cp /usr/share/applications/google-chrome.desktop ~/.local/share/applications
  2. gedit ~/.local/share/applications/google-chrome.desktop
  3. Highlight and copy the text below, then paste it at the bottom of the file.

    X-Ayatana-Desktop-Shortcuts=WebGL;

    [WebGL Shortcut Group] Name=Google Chrome with WebGL Exec=google-chrome --enable-webgl --allow-file-access-from-files --ignore-gpu-blacklist TargetEnvironment=Unity

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