The 30-second openchrome install guide

Building the openchrome driver for Xorg from a tarball release

This is the recommended method. Don't use the SVN sources unless you absolutely need to.

Get the latest release tarball from http://openchrome.org/releases, decompress it then build and install the driver :

wget http://www.openchrome.org/releases/xf86-video-openchrome-some.version.tar.gz
tar xvzf xf86-video-openchrome-some.version.tar.gz
cd xf86-video-openchrome-some.version
./configure --prefix=/usr
make
sudo make install

Building the openchrome driver for Xorg from an svn checkout

These are generic instructions; see the bottom of the page for distro-specific links.

First make backups of your current /usr/lib/xorg/modules/drivers/openchrome_drv.so and /usr/lib/libchromeXvMC*so* files — these will be overwritten during 'make install' below.

mkdir openchrome
cd openchrome
svn co http://svn.openchrome.org/svn/trunk
cd trunk
./autogen.sh --prefix=/usr
make

su -c 'make install'
or
sudo make install

Building the DRM kernel modules

On modern kernels (2.6.22 and later) the DRM is up-to-date. Compile these modules yourself only if your kernel is older.
When your libdrm is older than 2.3.0, you also need to build the drm library from source, and when your kernel is older than 2.6.22 ,also the drm.ko and via.ko kernel modules.


Get the source
git clone git://anongit.freedesktop.org/git/mesa/drm
cd drm

Install libdrm
Do this part only if your libdrm is older than 2.3.0.
./autogen.sh
make
make install

Install kernel modules
cd linux-core
make LINUXDIR=/lib/modules/`uname -r`/build DRM_MODULES=via
cp *.ko /lib/modules/`uname -r`/kernel/drivers/char/drm/
depmod -ae

Using the driver

In /etc/X11/xorg.conf, in the Section " Device", change the driver to "openchrome". That is all. Now restart X. Then proceed to the Checking whether it works page.

Distro-specific instructions

For more detailed step-by-step instructions for different distros, follow these links:

Building openchrome on Ubuntu

Compiling the source code on Debian

Compiling the source code on Gentoo