Hello Everyone,

I am trying to install Blender to learn to do some 3D modeling for jewelery designs. I installed the Slackbuild and it installed just fine with no errors. Start the program, opens fine. Only problem is there are no drop down menus at all, just empty space. Doesn't matter what drop down menu or pop up menu, they are all blank, just white space. Everything else about the program seems to run just fine.

I have uninstalled and reinstalled twice, same result after the reinstall.
I don't have a clue what to investigate since running from the command line shows no errors.

Any thoughts or help would be greatly appreciated.

Bob

It's likely an issue with your drivers. Are you using an intel GPU?

Adam

Thanks for the reply. No I have an ATI graphics card, and it works with Blender in Fedora, but incredibly slow in this dual core AMD laptop. It works in Ubuntu on my desktop with a very old Nvidia card (FX5500). I installed it on Slack because it does run fast, just this issue with menus being blank. I have direct rendering with with laptop running Slack current.

Bob

Edit: just thought I would mention that the menu titles appear, but when I run my mouse cursor over them they go black and clicking on them just shows an empty white box.

Using the open source or closed source drivers? What version? If you're not sure, please show us the output of 'glxinfo'.

Adam

Hi Adam,

I am using the open source drivers (without an xorg.conf). I have one of those ATI cards for which there is no longer a prop. driver (X1250). I believe the issue must be in the software because I triple boot this laptop with Ubuntu and Fedora and it runs OK in Fedora, just slow.

The output of GLXINFO simply tells me the capability of the card and that I have direct rendering. I don't believe the problem is related to my graphics drivers, though I have certainly been wrong before.

Thanks again,

Bob

I'm fairly certain it has everything to do with your video card drivers. Fedora and Ubuntu are very likely using newer versions of the drivers than slackware (even -current). IIRC, -current is at 7.5.1. All I could really suggest is grabbing a newer version. Mesa 7.6.1 is out and contained a number of fixes, including fixes specific to blender.

Adam

Thanks Adam, I will try just that. You are correct, Fedora is showing that Mesa 7.7.1-devel is the version installed and Ubuntu 7.6.1. I'll see how it goes and post back. Thanks for your help.

Bob

put this into your .bashrc or .bash_profile:

export BLENDER_FORCE_SWAPBUFFERS=1

Thank you very much for your suggestion. I didn't have a .bashrc so I created one and put your suggested entry into it. No result, I'm afraid, still shows no menu items when clicked on.

I was, however, able to get it running well in Ubuntu which I triple boot on this computer, so at least I am able to use the application.

Thank you again.

Bob