Getting Mesa

# Downloading

Primary Mesa download site: freedesktop.org (FTP)

When a new release is coming, release candidates (betas) may be found here.

The Mesa package is named MesaLib-x.y.z.{tar.bz2, tar.gz, zip} where x.y.z is the version. There are three types of compressed archives.

In the past, there was also MesaGLUT-x.y.z.{tar.bz2, tar.gz, zip} packages which contained Mark Kilgard's GLUT library. Most Linux distributions include an implementation of GLUT (such as freeglut).

In the past, the Mesa demos collection was distributed as MesaDemos-x.y.z.{tar.bz2, tar.gz, zip}. Now, the Mesa demos are distributed separately.

# Unpacking

To unpack .tar.gz files:

    	tar zxf MesaLib-x.y.z.tar.gz

or

    	gzcat MesaLib-x.y.z.tar.gz | tar xf -

or

    	gunzip MesaLib-x.y.z.tar.gz ; tar xf MesaLib-x.y.z.tar

To unpack .tar.bz2 files:

    	bunzip2 -c MesaLib-x.y.z.tar.gz | tar xf -

To unpack .zip files:

    	unzip MesaLib-x.y.z.zip

# Contents

After unpacking you'll have these files and directories (among others):

    Makefile	- top-level Makefile for most systems
    configs/	- makefile parameter files for various systems
    include/	- GL header (include) files
    bin/		- shell scripts for making shared libraries, etc
    docs/		- documentation
    src/		- source code for libraries
    src/mesa	- sources for the main Mesa library and device drivers
    src/gallium     - sources for Gallium and Gallium drivers
    src/glu		- libGLU source code
    src/glx		- sources for building libGL with full GLX and DRI support

If you downloaded and unpacked the MesaGLUT.x.y.z package:

    src/glut	- GLUT library source code

Proceed to the compilation and installation instructions.