This article is very outdated. It is about an inactive project to create a 3D Linux/Unix desktop environment. The project was called Project Looking Glass and it has nothing to do with modern software of the same name that has something to do with KVM or holographic displays.

This guide is based on the instructions from lg3d.dev.java.net/lg3d-getting-started.html


First off, add the following to your /etc/apt/sources.list file


     ## LG3D repsoitories
      deb javadesktop.org/lg3d/debian stable contrib

Then run the following two separate commands:

  sudo apt-get update
  sudo apt-get install lg3d-core

That should be all that is needed to install Looking Glass. However you might get the following error just as I did when installing on Ubuntu 8.10 :

lg3d-x11/programs/Xserver: No such file or directory
chown: cannot access `Xorg': No such file or directory
chgrp: cannot access `Xorg': No such file or directory
chmod: cannot access `Xorg': No such file or directory
dpkg: error processing lg3d-core (--configure):
 subprocess post-installation script returned error exit status 1
Errors were encountered while processing:
 lg3d-core
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)

If you get that kind of error, then try the following steps which worked for me.

  1. With root priviliges, create the file /bin/arch with the following line as it's contents:
    uname -m
  2. After you save /bin/arch, run:
    sudo chmod 755 /bin/arch
  3. After that you should be able to install Looking Glass with
    sudo apt-get install lg3d-core

Once you've installed Looking Glass, log out and then log back in after selecting "Looking Glass" as your session type.

Frankly, I thought Looking Glass was pretty interesting, but hard to use, and it made me feel dizzy and kind of nauseus. But it was certainly fun to use for about 5 minutes.