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.

There's also the MesaGLUT-x.y.z.{tar.bz2, tar.gz, zip} packages which contain Mark Kilgard's GLUT library. This is optional. 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
src/glw		- Xt/Motif/OpenGL widget code
If you downloaded and unpacked the MesaGLUT.x.y.z package: 
src/glut	- GLUT library source code

Proceed to the compilation and installation instructions.