Force software based opengl rendering

Question

How may I force an application to use software based opengl rendering on Ubuntu?

Answer 1

sudo apt-get install libgl1-mesa-swx11

will remove the libgl1-mesa-glx hardware-accelerated Mesa libraries and install the software-only renderer.

Alternately, you can set LIBGL_ALWAYS_SOFTWARE=1, which will only affect programs started with that environment variable, not the entire system.

Answer 2

If this is about your own application, you can link to the software OpenGL implementation Mesa3D.