I have used Sketchup ver 7 (a 3d CAD program) in Windows XP for several years. I recently started using XP in a Virtualbox environment. Sketchup seemed to install OK in virtual XP. However, when I start it up I get a message that states that it cannot find OpenGL. I’m aware that I can download and install an OpenGL driver. Do you think that is all I need to do or is there more to it?
Thanks
You have to install the right driver. In your case, that should be included (AFAIK) in the “VirtualBox Guest Extensions”.
Agent D,
Thanks for the info. As a new user and a non-tech person, I think I have installed everything including “guest additions” and “extensions”. I have been informed by the Sketchup Community that Sketchup isn’t supported in a virtual environment. So, maybe it just won’t work. Actually, I almost screwed up my working installation by messing around trying to get Sketchup to work. Thanks to a “snapshot” I took before hand, I’m back working again. I think I will stop trying to make it work unless I can learn something definitive that will make it work.
I looked in Settings where it shows the extensions installed. When touching it with the mouse pointer, it indicates that the following is installed:
USB 2.0 Host Contoller
Host Webcam
Virtualbox RDP
PXE ROM w/E1000 support
I’m guessing that none of these have anything to do with OpenGL?
I appreciate your help
According to the the section in the VirtualBox manual, 3D acceleration is included in the guest additions.
As far as I can remember, the setup has the checkbox “3D acceleration (experimental)” not selected by default, so you have to select that when installing the guest additions.
The manual also mentions (logically) that the host operationg system also needs to have hardware acceleration for OpenGL(R), so you need to have the drivers installed
both inside the virtual machine, as well as on your host system.
On your system, you need to have the graphics drivers for your graphics card installed, as those normally contain an OpenGL(R) implementation for your graphics card.
If you are on Windows(R), you need the graphics drivers for your specific graphics card.
If you are on a X11/Linux based operating system, you need to install either the proprietary drivers from your graphics card vendor, or Mesa3D with free (aka Open Source) drivers.
If you are on a Mac OS X system, that shouldn’t be a problem to begin with.
Thanks for the guidance. I’m working on a Lenovo G550 w/ 4gb mem. The graphics card is an Intel GMA 4500M which is a low end card but it is 3d capable. I dual boot Windows 7 and PCLinuxOS. I work in the Linux distro 95% of the time and have installed WinXP as a Virtualbox guest so that I can run my favorite windows based CAD program without leaving Linux to reboot Windows 7. While I don’t use Sketchup often, I thought it would be convenient to have it as a guest also. It runs in Windows 7 just fine and I had it running previously on a stand-a-lone XP box.
Virtualbox guest additions is set to 3d acceleration (experimental) and, in Settings, “extended features” has “3d acceleration” enabled. Linux is runing a file named libdri-drivers which is an “Open 3.0 compatible 3d graphics library” along with several other graphics related files. These include MESA drivers.
Thanks again