# Recommendations for KDE Plasma 5 on Mobility Radeon 7500?

## Lebkoungcity

Hello,

until today I had a struggle with getting KDE Plasma 5 getting to run on my ThinkPad (see: https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-1046392.html). I succeeded when I replaced the 

```
VIDEO_CARDS="radeon"
```

 with 

```
VIDEO_CARDS="vesa"
```

 in /etc/portage/make.conf, unmerged x11-drivers/xf86-video-ati and had 'emerge -auvDN world' doing its job. After that both SDDM and complete KDE Plasma 5 started successfully - but of course without hardware acceleration.

KDE Plasma 5 relies heavily on OpenGL and needs at least version 2.0. The ATI Mobility Radeon 7500 is capable of OpenGL-1.3 (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATi_Radeon_R100_Series).

Do I have any options other than dropping KDE Plasma 5, staying with it but just with a not so snappy interface or buying a new machine?

Greetings,

Andy

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## asturm

You should be able to still use your native driver but switch to XRender or switch off compositing at startup. Won't look as fancy, but should do the job better than vesa.

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## Lebkoungcity

Hi genstorm,

unfortunatly it isn't this easy. I can't reach these settings in 'systemsettings5'. When I use 'VIDEO_CARDS="radeon"' it is like this:

- if user 'sddm' is in the 'video' group SDDM shows a complete white screen; if user 'sddm' isn't in the 'video' group sddm acts normal and I can log in (using lightdm does not change anything in the following)

- screen turns completly black

- after a while mouse cursor appears (it is in the design that was chosen in systemsettings5 while I used "VIDEO_CARDS="vesa"') but nothing else is shown at this moment

- after another while kMail-window opens (telling that the connection to akonadi isn't already established but some moments later that's OK) and I'm able to minimize/close this window

- and another while later drkonqi shows up and tells me that plasma has died

- (left / middle / right) clicking on the still black background doesn't do anything

- I'm able to start konsole via clicking in the drkonqi-window the dialog which starts gdb (this opens up konsole in which gdb is being run) and then I can open up new tabs inside this window

- I can start systemsettings5 via konsole but it instantly dies when I want to go to the setting to disable compositing giving me these lines:

```
Constructing a KPluginInfo object from old style JSON. Please use kcoreaddons_desktop_to_json() for 

"/usr/lib/qt5/plugins/kwin/effects/configs/kcm_kwin4_genericscripted.so" instead of kservice_desktop_to_json() in your CMake code.

QOpenGLShader: could not create shader

QOpenGLShader: could not create shader

QOpenGLShader: could not create shader

QOpenGLShader: could not create shader

QOpenGLShader: could not create shader

QOpenGLShader: could not create shader

QOpenGLShader: could not create shader

QOpenGLShader: could not create shader

QOpenGLShader: could not create shader

QOpenGLShader: could not create shader

Speicherzugriffsfehler
```

- So I turned back to 'VIDEO_CARDS="vesa"', disabled compositing in systemstettings5 and after this changed to 'VIDEO_CARDS="radeon"', restarted the system to be 100% sure

--> everything is still the same (black screen, cursor appears, kMail shows up, plasma dies)

I found this thread:

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=356839

and added the given lines to ~.bashrc:

```
QT_XCB_FORCE_SOFTWARE_OPENGL=1

LIBGL_ALWAYS_SOFTWARE="true"
```

but without an effect on my problem.

After this I remembered 'eselect qtgraphicssystem' and tried the different alternatives but this didn't help so I set it back to default:

```
eselect qtgraphicssystem list

Available Qt Graphics Systems:                                                                                               

  [1]   native                                                                                                               

  [2]   opengl (experimental)                                                                                                

  [3]   raster (default) *
```

I also found this thread in the virtualbox-forums:

https://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=69178

There is a quote from a developer in the KDE team which gives little hope for me:

 *Quote:*   

> KDE5 makes *much* more use of *much* more advanced OpenGL in *many* more GL contexts (QtQuick being the main driver here, but we also removed the OpenGL 1.3 backend from KWin) - it's very likely that this knocks out the virtualbox GL driver, yes.

 

So I guess I'm stuck with 'VIDEO_CARDS="vesa"'?

Greetings,

Andy

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## asturm

SDDM hits the same issue as Plasma-5 on your system, Qt5Gui requiring OpenGL 2+: https://github.com/sddm/sddm/issues/575

 *Lebkoungcity wrote:*   

> I found this thread:
> 
> https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=356839
> 
> and added the given lines to ~.bashrc:
> ...

 

You need to create a file inside /etc/env.d/, your ~/.bashrc would only work for you if you started Plasma-5 without a login manager.

https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Handbook:X86/Working/EnvVar

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