stereo

General

3D Stereo on RHEL/CentOS 6 systems

Nvidia 3d stereo on RHEL 6 is reasonably straight-forward. Take a look here for an example xorg.conf file. This configuration if for a Quadro 4000 card and a 1920x1080 display. Your settings may vary depending on your hardware.

3D Stereo on RHEL/CentOS 7 systems with Gnome 3

Nvidia 3D stereo typically requires disabling the Composite extension in X.org. Unfortunately, this extension is required to run Gnome 3 and the gdm login mangager supplied as the default desktop in CentOS and many other linux distributions.

As of version 337.19 of the nvidia driver, some Quadro configurations can operate with the composite extension enabled, but stereo functionality depends on a stereo-aware composite manager. The Composite manager in CentOS7 Gnome3 is not stereo aware and 3D stereo does not work by default.

In order to use 3D stereo on Gnome3 systems, you can switch from Gnome3/gdm to MATE/lightdm. The MATE Desktop Environment is the continuation of GNOME 2 which is the default desktop in CentOS 5 and 6.

To change to MATE on CentOS7 systems, first, install the Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux (EPEL) repo:

  yum install epel-release

Then install the nvidia drivers from epel

   yum install kmod-nvidia

You may find you need these packages as well

   yum install mesa-libGLU-9.0.0-4.el7.x86_64 libXScrnSaver-1.2.2-6.1.el7.x86_64

Next, install lightdm which doesn't require the composite extension.

  yum install lightdm

From there we do a couple of groupinstalls You may have these rpms installed already, but just for good measure

  yum group install  "X Window System"

then

   yum groupinstall "MATE Desktop"

Toggle from gdm to lightdm in systemd using systemctl. To see what you are using as a 'display manager', check this link

ls -l /etc/systemd/system/display-manager.service

This is likely pointing to gdm and should be changed to point to lightdm. You can change that with systemctl.

    systemctl disable gdm
    systemctl enable lightdm

And then this will reload you changes, similar to changing runlevels with sysinitV

    systemctl isolate graphical.target

Make sure to select MATE from the drop menu as your graphical before you login.

Mac OS X

  • Prior to OS X 10.8, the stock X11 has better compatibility than the Xquartz development version available from MacOSForge. With the OS X 10.8 release, X11 is no longer included by Apple, and you'll need to install the latest Xquartz version offered on the MacOSForge site to run X11-based applications.

Laptops