Could not initialize SDL: No available video device!

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alchemist_alchemist
Posts: 2
Joined: Thu Jul 01, 2021 3:02 am

Could not initialize SDL: No available video device!

Post by alchemist_alchemist »

Hi everyone,

I've been trying to run ScummVM 2.2.0 on MX Linux 19.4 (based on Debian 10) for a few days now. Nothing happens when trying to start it from the GUI, and using the Terminal gives the error:

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Could not initialize SDL: No available video device!
I've tried uninstalling and reinstalling, both from the .deb package and from the package manager, but haven't had any luck launching either. I have SDL 2.0.14 installed and am using a NVIDIA 2080 Super with proprietary drivers. Am I doing something wrong here or is this a bug?
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sev
ScummVM Lead
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Joined: Wed Sep 21, 2005 1:06 pm
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Re: Could not initialize SDL: No available video device!

Post by sev »

This is something related to the libSDL configuration, you could try to reach out to them or read their documentation.


Eugene
alchemist_alchemist
Posts: 2
Joined: Thu Jul 01, 2021 3:02 am

Re: Could not initialize SDL: No available video device!

Post by alchemist_alchemist »

Thanks; although SDL's documentation wasn't much help, knowing that it was not a ScummVM problem helped narrow down the issue. At first I thought I'd just compiled SDL incorrectly, so I removed it and tried installing through Synaptic. For some reason even though Debian's SDL package includes X11 and Wayland, it still refused to launch regardless of which driver I specified in the environment variables. I searched around some more and found this forum thread https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=944671. The second-to-last post was more-or-less the solution that finally worked. TL;DR for anyone else with this problem: remove scummvm and all versions of libsdl that are currently installed, then install libsdl1.2-dev, download the latest SDL version from libsdl.org, extract it, compile using

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./configure
and

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make
then finally

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sudo make install
Reinstall ScummVM and it should (hopefully) launch.
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