Workaround for HipChat on Linux: “can’t find build id”, “HashElfTextSection”

The new version of HipChat added support for video and screen-sharing. It also introduced the new requirement of OpenGL 2.0. On my computer, HipChat would crash on startup with repeated messages of

[code]
can’t find build id
HashElfTextSection
can’t find build id
HashElfTextSection
can’t find build id
HashElfTextSection
can’t find build id
HashElfTextSection
[/code]

I wasn’t going to try video chatting on my old netbook anyways, so there’s no reason I needed hardware support for rendering text and emoticons.

First, get your system’s OpenGL info by running `glxinfo | grep OpenGL` and find your version string:

OpenGL vendor string: Tungsten Graphics, Inc
OpenGL renderer string: Mesa DRI Intel(R) 945GME x86/MMX/SSE2
OpenGL version string: 1.4 Mesa 8.0.4

If it’s a Mesa driver, you can force software rendering by setting LIBGL_ALWAYS_SOFTWARE=1. Try running HipChat like so:

LIBGL_ALWAYS_SOFTWARE=1 hipchat

And see if HipChat will run. You can also check what your OpenGL version is with software rendering by running

LIBGL_ALWAYS_SOFTWARE=1 glxinfo | grep OpenGL

and make sure that the output lists 2.0+:

OpenGL vendor string: VMware, Inc.
OpenGL renderer string: Gallium 0.4 on llvmpipe (LLVM 0x300)
OpenGL version string: 2.1 Mesa 8.0.4