I’m a big user of Empathy, it’s a great app. It connects to world+dog so when I rebuilt a PC recently with LMDE (Debian Testing via Mint) I was kinda irate to find that it didn’t work once installed.
When running on the command line I got this:
failed to create drawable.
Unable to select the newly created GLX context
Turns out that is you have MesaGLX and libclutter-1.0-0 on Debian and Ubuntu with your standard 2D driver, GTK apps such as Empathy won’t start.
My fix was quite easy, I installed the NVidia and NVidia-glx binaries and used those in my system rather than the opensource nouveau drivers. Not only did this have a massive performance increase, the GLX issues went away.