OpenGL Shader exception in Vncviewer

Question

I connect the remote Ubuntu 12.04 64bit by vncviewer application. But when I run a OpenGL application, it shows the exception information:

    Caught exception GLShader::GLShader: GL_ARB_shader_objects not supported while initializing rendering windows

But if I connect the monitor with the remote computer, it works well and could show the OpenGL application.

Is there any solution to make the OpenGL application run in the remote window by vncviewer? Thanks!

UPDATED:

In the remote Ubuntu 12.04 64bit server, the ~/.vnc/xstartup file is as follows: .

And the VNC Viewer client in a Windows 7 32bit system is as follows:

Answer 1

Usually on Linux the VNC server is a dedicated variant of the Xorg X11 server (Xvnc) that uses a software based renderer backend and has not GPU acceleration. I guess you're using a NVidia GPU and the NVidia proprietary drivers, or AMD GPU with AMD proprietary drivers, because otherwise the Mesa softpipe implementation would have kicked in.

If you really want to use the GPU you'll have to VNC into a running X11 session into which you start the x11vnc server.

Update

First things first, for the GPU to work a X server must be running and have its output be sent to the display connectors. Sorry, the current driver model doesn't allow for a purely off-screen GPU accelerated X11 sever; this is not a limitation of the hardware, but just the Xorg X11 server implementation. This also means, that whatever you're doing will be visible to whoever connects a monitor to the screen. At least we can take care of, that nobody messes with mouse and keyboard.

First things first create a custom /etc/X11/xorg.vnc.conf consisting of this

Section "ServerFlags"
    Option "AllowEmptyInput"   "true"
    Option "AutoAddDevices"    "off"
    Option "DontZap"           "false"
    Option "DontVTSwitch"      "true"
    Option "HandleSpecialKeys" "Never"
EndSection

Section "Device"
    Identifier  "DeviceGPU"
    Driver      "nvidia"
EndSection

Next implement a script stat starts everything you want to run in that particular X11 session. Most of the time this would be something that launches the x11vnc server and then execs into the desktop envinronment, e.g.

#!/bin/sh
x11vnc -display $DISPLAY &
exec startxfce4 # or whatever

I refer you to the manpage of x11vnc on how to configure the authentication to use.

Lastly you should check that the Xorg server binary is SUID root; the NVidia driver is still not making full use of KMS and depends on the X server being started with full privileges.

Once these prerequsites are met you can start a X11 session that supports VNC using

xinit $FULL_PATH_TO_YOUR_SESSION_SCRIPT -- $DISPLAY -config xorg.vnc.conf

where $DISPLAY is a free X11 display number.