Compiling and Installing

  1. Unix / X11
  2. Windows
  3. Building with SCons
  4. Other

1. Unix/X11 Compilation and Installation

1.1 General prerequisites for building

1.2 Prerequisites for DRI and hardware acceleration

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

1.3 Building with Autoconf

Mesa may be built using autoconf. This should work well on most GNU-based systems. If that fails the traditional Mesa build system is available.

1.4 Building with traditional Makefiles

The traditional Mesa build system is based on a collection of pre-defined system configurations.

To see the list of configurations, just type make. Then choose a configuration from the list and type make configname.

Mesa may be built in several different ways using the predefined configurations:

Later, if you want to rebuild for a different configuration run make realclean before rebuilding.

1.5 The libraries

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          12 Mar 26 07:53 libglut.so -> libglut.so.3*
lrwxrwxrwx    1 brian    users          16 Mar 26 07:53 libglut.so.3 -> libglut.so.3.7.1*
-rwxr-xr-x    1 brian    users      597754 Mar 26 07:53 libglut.so.3.7.1*
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.
libglut is the GLUT 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 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.

1.6 Installing the header and library files

The standard location for the OpenGL header files on Unix-type systems is in /usr/include/GL/. The standard location for the libraries is /usr/lib/. For more information see, the Linux/OpenGL ABI specification.

If you'd like Mesa to co-exist with another implementation of OpenGL that's already installed, you'll have to choose different directories, like /usr/local/include/GL/ and /usr/local/lib/.

To install Mesa's headers and libraries, run make install. But first, check the Mesa/configs/default file and examine the values of the INSTALL_DIR and DRI_DRIVER_INSTALL_DIR variables. Change them if needed, then run make install.

The variable DESTDIR may also be used to install the contents to a temporary staging directory. This can be useful for package management. For example: make install DESTDIR=/somepath/

Note: at runtime you can use the LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable (on Linux at least) to switch between the Mesa libraries and other vendor's libraries whenever you want. This is a handy way to compare multiple OpenGL implementations.

1.7 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

2. Windows Compilation and Installation

Please see the instructions on building with SCons.

3. Building with SCons

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. Other systems

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