Downloading

Primary download site: SourceForge

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

Mesa is distributed in several parts:

• MesaLib-x.y.z - the main Mesa library source code, drivers and documentation.
• MesaDemos-x.y.z - OpenGL demonstration and test programs. Most of the programs require GLUT (either the original GLUT by Mark Kilgard or freeglut or OpenGLUT).
• MesaGLUT-x.y.z - Mark Kilgard's GLUT, easily compiled and used with Mesa. Plus, other implementation of GLUT for DOS, OS/2, BeOS, etc.

If you're not interested in running the demos, you'll only need the first package.

If you're new to this and not sure what you're doing, grab all three packages.

The packages are available in .tar.gz, .tar.bz2 and .zip formats. Other sites might offer additional package formats.

Unpacking

All the packages should be in the same directory prior to unpacking.

• To unpack .tar.gz files:

  	tar zxf MesaLib-X.Y.tar.gz
  	tar zxf MesaDemos-X.Y.tar.gz
  	tar zxf MesaGLUT-X.Y.tar.gz
  

  or

  	gzcat MesaLib-X.Y.tar.gz | tar xf -
  	gzcat MesaDemos-X.Y.tar.gz | tar xf -
  	gzcat MesaGLUT-X.Y.tar.gz | tar xf -
  

  or

  	gunzip MesaLib-X.Y.tar.gz ; tar xf MesaLib-X.Y.tar
  	gunzip MesaDemos-X.Y.tar.gz ; tar xf MesaDemos-X.Y.tar
  	gunzip MesaGLUT-X.Y.tar.gz ; tar xf MesaGLUT-X.Y.tar
  

• To unpack .tar.bz2 files:

  	bunzip2 -c MesaLib-X.Y.tar.gz | tar xf -
  	bunzip2 -c MesaDemos-X.Y.tar.gz | tar xf -
  	bunzip2 -c MesaGLUT-X.Y.tar.gz | tar xf -
  

• To unpack .zip files:

  	unzip MesaLib-X.Y.zip
  	unzip MesaDemos-X.Y.zip
  	unzip MesaGLUT-X.Y.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/glu		- libGLU source code
src/glx		- sources for building libGL with full GLX and DRI support
src/glw		- Xt/Motif/OpenGL widget code

progs/demos	- original Mesa demos
progs/xdemos	- GLX OpenGL/Mesa demos
progs/redbook	- examples from the OpenGL Programming Guide
progs/samples	- examples from SGI
progs/images/	- image files

src/glut	- GLUT library source code

Proceed to the compilation and installation instructions.