Compiling and Installing

  1. Prerequisites for building
  2. Building with autoconf (Linux/Unix/X11)
  3. Building with SCons (Windows/Linux)
  4. Building for other systems
  5. Library Information
  6. Building OpenGL programs with pkg-config

1. Prerequisites for building

1.1 General

1.2 For DRI and hardware acceleration

The following are required for DRI-based hardware acceleration with Mesa:

If you're using a fedora distro the following command should install all the needed dependencies: 

  sudo yum install flex bison imake libtool xorg-x11-proto-devel libdrm-devel \
  gcc-c++ xorg-x11-server-devel libXi-devel libXmu-devel libXdamage-devel git \
  expat-devel llvm-devel

2. Building with autoconf (Linux/Unix/X11)

The primary method to build Mesa on Unix systems is with autoconf.

The general approach is the standard: 

  ./configure
  make
  sudo make install
But please read the detailed autoconf instructions for more details.

3. Building with SCons (Windows/Linux)

To build Mesa with SCons on Linux or Windows do 

    scons

The build output will be placed in build/platform-machine-debug/..., where platform is for example linux or windows, machine is x86 or x86_64, optionally followed by -debug for debug builds.

To build Mesa with SCons for Windows on Linux using the MinGW crosscompiler toolchain do 

    scons platform=windows toolchain=crossmingw machine=x86 mesagdi libgl-gdi

This will create:

Put them all in the same directory to test them.

4. Building for other systems

Documentation for other environments (some may be very out of date):

5. Library Information

When compilation has finished, look in the top-level lib/ (or lib64/) directory. You'll see a set of library files similar to this: 

lrwxrwxrwx    1 brian    users          10 Mar 26 07:53 libGL.so -> libGL.so.1*
lrwxrwxrwx    1 brian    users          19 Mar 26 07:53 libGL.so.1 -> libGL.so.1.5.060100*
-rwxr-xr-x    1 brian    users     3375861 Mar 26 07:53 libGL.so.1.5.060100*
lrwxrwxrwx    1 brian    users          11 Mar 26 07:53 libGLU.so -> libGLU.so.1*
lrwxrwxrwx    1 brian    users          20 Mar 26 07:53 libGLU.so.1 -> libGLU.so.1.3.060100*
-rwxr-xr-x    1 brian    users      549269 Mar 26 07:53 libGLU.so.1.3.060100*
lrwxrwxrwx    1 brian    users          14 Mar 26 07:53 libOSMesa.so -> libOSMesa.so.6*
lrwxrwxrwx    1 brian    users          23 Mar 26 07:53 libOSMesa.so.6 -> libOSMesa.so.6.1.060100*
-rwxr-xr-x    1 brian    users       23871 Mar 26 07:53 libOSMesa.so.6.1.060100*

libGL is the main OpenGL library (i.e. Mesa).
libGLU is the OpenGL Utility library.
libOSMesa is the OSMesa (Off-Screen) interface library.

If you built the DRI hardware drivers, you'll also see the DRI drivers: 

-rwxr-xr-x   1 brian users 16895413 Jul 21 12:11 i915_dri.so
-rwxr-xr-x   1 brian users 16895413 Jul 21 12:11 i965_dri.so
-rwxr-xr-x   1 brian users 11849858 Jul 21 12:12 r200_dri.so
-rwxr-xr-x   1 brian users 16050488 Jul 21 12:11 r300_dri.so
-rwxr-xr-x   1 brian users 11757388 Jul 21 12:12 radeon_dri.so

If you built with Gallium support, look in lib/gallium/ for Gallium-based versions of libGL and device drivers.

6. Building OpenGL programs with pkg-config

Running make install will install package configuration files for the pkg-config utility.

When compiling your OpenGL application you can use pkg-config to determine the proper compiler and linker flags.

For example, compiling and linking a GLUT application can be done with: 

   gcc `pkg-config --cflags --libs glut` mydemo.c -o mydemo