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I'm looking into running libGDX based app on a Ubuntu Server. The server has no GPU. The purpose is to render animations defined as libGDX "games". The perfect setup would pipe frames out to standard output. I'm OK with some kind of software-simulated GPU.

I'm aware of libGDX headless mode, but as far as I understand it will not render any graphics.

atok
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  • I'm trying to do something similar - getting a LibGDX LWJGL ApplicationListener running on Travis CI so I can run tests. Would love to know if you got this working! – DeejUK Mar 07 '15 at 07:42

1 Answers1

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LibGDX on Linux depends upon the LWJGL library for setting up rendering support. So, what you want to find out is if/how LWJGL can run without a GPU. Both LibGDX and LWJGL expose fairly low-level OpenGL commands, so I think what you need is the Mesa library (it exposes OpenGL support, but does everything in software).

From this question: Does LWJGL (bare) use software or hardware rendering? it looks like you can ask LWJGL to not require hardware support. But, I think you still need some software-support enabled (and I believe that would be Mesa).

If you get this stack working, I think the next step is to have your "game" render to a FrameBuffer and then use Libgdx to render the FrameBuffer to file inside libgdx or OpenGL. (There may be ways to get lower layers of the stack to render to a file, too.)

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P.T.
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