Driconf: enabling S3 texture compression on Linux

S3TC (also known as DXTn or DXTC) is a patented lossy texture compression algorithm. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S3TC for more detailed information. Because this algorithm is patented it is disabled by default on many Linux distributions. To enable it you can use a handy utility called DRIconf, which you can find at: http://dri.freedesktop.org/wiki/DriConf . Many games use S3TC and if you use Wine to play games Windows games under Linux you definitely want to enable it if your graphics card supports it.

Steps to enable it

  1. Install it, it's called "driconf" as a package on most distributions (ArchLinux and Debian).

    ArchLinux:
    # pacman -S driconf
    Debian:
    # aptitude install driconf
  2. Run driconf and enable S3TC
    DRIconf
    DRIconf
  3. ???
  4. PROFIT!!!, err I mean have fun :)