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
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.