How to run Blender for 3D modeling?

User Support
1

My laptop only has Intel integrated graphics (UHD Graphics 620 in an i5-8250u cpu). Can I run blender in a qube?

Another thread says this is possible (List of programs that work with Qubes). But I haven’t figured out how to run blender yet.

I installed blender in a disposable qube and run it. Blender crashed.

[user@disp601 ~]$ sudo dnf install blender
...
[user@disp601 ~]$ blender
BLT_lang_init: 'locale' data path for translations not found, continuing
intern/ghost/intern/GHOST_WindowX11.cpp:136: X11 glXQueryVersion() failed, verify working openGL system!
initial window could not find the GLX extension
Writing: /tmp/blender.crash.txt
Segmentation fault (core dumped)
2

I’m using i7, but i5 might be outdated today.

3

Did you figure out how to run blender in a qube?

4

Might be around 3500MB of qubes ram to run about at least 7 hours for full 4-5 minutes of video.

/works!

5

blender crashed when I tried to run it:

[user@disp601 ~]$ blender
BLT_lang_init: 'locale' data path for translations not found, continuing
intern/ghost/intern/GHOST_WindowX11.cpp:136: X11 glXQueryVersion() failed, verify working openGL system!
initial window could not find the GLX extension
Writing: /tmp/blender.crash.txt
Segmentation fault (core dumped)

I can’t even model a sphere.

How did you manage to run blender in a qube?

7

Blender says it crashed because blender can’t find a working openGL system.

This has nothing to do with I5 is too outdated to run because you need about 1.5GHz of cpu to work

8

What desktop environment and is it 4.1?

9

I am running Qubes OS 4.1 on the computer.

[user@disp601 ~]$ glxgears
Error: couldn't get an RGB, Double-buffered visual
[user@disp601 ~]$ glxinfo
name of display: :0
Error: couldn't find RGB GLX visual or fbconfig
10

Can you list the hardwares of your PC currently using with full details?

11

Does glxgears work in dom0?

12

glxgears and glxinfo in dom0 work as expected.

Trying to ask opengl to use software render in the qube doesn’t work:

[user@disp601 ~]$ QT_XCB_FORCE_SOFTWARE_OPENGL=1 glxgears 
Error: couldn't get an RGB, Double-buffered visual
[user@disp601 ~]$ LIBGL_ALWAYS_SOFTWARE=1 glxgears 
Error: couldn't get an RGB, Double-buffered visual
13

Make sure you have the mesa driver installed and loaded.

GL_RENDERER   = llvmpipe (LLVM 11.0.1, 256 bits)
GL_VERSION    = 3.1 Mesa 20.3.5
GL_VENDOR     = Mesa/X.org

You can try glxgears -info to see the renderer being used

14

maybe gui virtualization can work

15

can you run glxgear in a qube based on full template?

I can’t run glxinfo/glxgear in a qube based on minimal templates.

dnf list says even the minimal templates have the mesa library for libglapi.

i am installing the fedora-36 template. just to make sure.

16

It works for me in that standard Debian 11 template, after I installed mesa-util.

17

I give the qube two cores in the i5-8250u cpu and 4GB ram. Modelling a tiny low poly scene seems to be workable but not comfortable.

When I just look at a small part of the scene, I need to wait ~0.1 seconds before I see the result of moving/rotating a rock in the scene. 0.2 seconds if I look at the whole scene.

Frame rate is about 2.5 - 3 fps for wire-frames in the viewport. I get the frame rate by pressing alt-ctrl-u and then play the viewport’s timeline.

The scene is from https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/coral-reef-9492bf6c1ab7471f99a87a32d21f12fe.

The frame rate of the starting scene (with just 1 cube and light) is 5 fps.

I think I can do the rendering with the GPU in google colab.