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PUBLISHED 8/20/2025
WRITTEN BY Christopher McRae
With the release of Mesa 22, support for older GPUs, such as Intel's Gen 1 and Gen 2 (Pre 2010), were dropped. This has resulted in a lack of hardware accelerated OpenGL support for anyone affected by this update. Debian 13 has migrated from Mesa 22 to Mesa 25 which has completely removed support for these older GPUs.
Installing the inxi package and running the command: inxi -G will show you information about your GPU including which OpenGL implementation is being used. If you see any mention of llvm or llvmpipe, your system is using a software OpenGL implementation instead of your GPU. This may be something as simple as a driver issue, but it is likely that you are running a version of mesa that has dropped support for your GPU.
The mesa project has community led branch that continues support for these older GPUs, it is called "amber". For users of Arch Linux, there appears to be a package already made for this. On Debian, installation is a little more difficult.
Ubuntu also provides a mesa-amber package that can be manually installed on a Debian system. Manually extracting and installing packages can be risky so proceed with caution.
Here is a link to source for Ubuntu's mesa-amber package for 24.04. Scroll to the bottom of the page and download the four non "dbgsym" packages. Here is a mirror if needed. You should have four DEB packages named:
Now extract all of the contents of each package. Inside each of their folders, you will find a usr directory, you should now copy the contents of each these usr directories to the their respective directories on your system, you can exclude "bug", "doc", and "DEBIAN" folders.
For example, if usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libglapi.so.0 exists in a DEB package, it should placed on your system at usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libglapi.so.0 (the same directory).
Now reboot and hopefully you have proper hardware accelerated OpenGL again. This has been tested on a Lenovo ThinkPad T410 with an i5-550M with success. If anything breaks, remove all of the files installed using the method above.