startx fails with "libGL.so.1: undefined symbol: __GLXGL_CORE_FUNCTIONS"

Question

I just hit this issue after a system upgrade. The greeter wouldn't launch properly. I was getting a black screen with only a cursor (but I could move it around). When trying to skip the greeter and start the graphical desktop manually I could finally get some feedback:

• ctrl-alt-f2 (switch to another virtual terminal)
• login
• startx

After startx failed, the following error was visibile in the terminal:

libGL.so.1: undefined symbol: __GLXGL_CORE_FUNCTIONS

I have only just ran a dnf system-upgrade, sudo dnf --refresh upgrade and installed nvidia drivers, so no packages should be out of date.

Answer 1

/usr/lib/libGL.so.1 should actually be a symlink. It may have been pointing to the wrong thing or the lib itself could have been bad, I don't know. The solution for me was:

# Check what package should create it
sudo dnf whatprovides libGL.so.1

# Reinstall it
sudo dnf reinstall libglvnd-glx

It was probably out of date because I had been messing with manually installing the nvidia driver via their .run binaries. This had failed and I'd instead installed akmod-nvidia.