Managed to get the X server into a weird state that just refused to do anything, so I rebooted my workstation. And it could neither find the hardware clock nor start the X server. Apparently I have a new x-org (likely from that security problem a while ago) and the Nvidia driver didn't seem to want to run until it was rebuilt. Still haven't figured out why the hwclock utility can't access /dev/rtp , looks like some sort of conflict with the xorg server (it's got the file open with "m" access).

Which is to say; I got somewhat distracted from the PyOpenGL hacking...