Portal 2 Tips

I experienced a couple of initial loading crashes with Portal 2 after a fresh Crossover installation. The installation itself went smoothly, but upon launching the game, it crashes immediately after the valve logo screen with the following error:

Could not load library client.

This was caused by the fact I had installed a new video driver using apt-get without rebooting the machine first. After rebooting, the error went away, and the game was able to load a bit further, but still crashed. Specifically, the game switches to fullscreen mode, you see the valve logo, then you see the initial Portal 2 menu splash screen, followed by an immediate crash to desktop without any visible error message.

It turns out this was caused by my having installed the Nvidia 295.53 drivers directly from their download installer, rather than using the Ubuntu PPA to install them. For other games (ex. Diablo 3) they worked flawlessly. But to get Portal 2 working, I had to do the following:

Completely uninstall the Nvidia driver using the install script:

• Download the "NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-295.53.run" file (use the same file and version originally used to install the driver) from the official Nvidia website.
• chmod +x the file and then run it with the --uninstall option from a non-X terminal (for example, from Ctrl-Alt-F1); for example:

        # press Ctrl-Alt-F1 to switch to a non-X terminal
        sudo su                                       # become root
        service lightdm stop                          # stop the X server
        ./NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-295.53.run --uninstall  # uninstall the driver
        service lightdm start                         # start the X server

Also, just for completeness, you may also want to run this, just to make sure you don't have any driver installed via apt-get:

• apt-get purge nvidia-current

Finally, reboot your machine.

Install the latest Nvidia driver using the PPA

After the reboot, run the following commands to install the latest Nvidia driver using the UbuntuUpdates PPA instead of the raw installer:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-x-swat/x-updates 
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install nvidia-current

Then, again reboot your machine.