MIME-Version: 1.0 Server: CERN/3.0 Date: Wednesday, 08-Jan-97 16:43:25 GMT Content-Type: text/html Content-Length: 4076 Last-Modified: Monday, 22-Jan-96 18:11:33 GMT
The Mesa OpenGL-like 3-D graphics library has been installed for use on the CS department public workstations. There are two flavors of public workstations available, the Sparc-5s in Painter Hall and the IBMs in both Painter and Taylor.
Mesa is a collection of graphics libraries, the MesaGL library, the MesaGLU library, the Mesaaux library and the Mesatk library. These are embodied in the files libMesaGL.a, libMesaGLU.a, libMesaaux.a, and libMesatk.a respectively. There is also a widget library that provides OpenGL widgets similar to SGI's GL widgets. This is in libMesaGLw.a . We also plan to offer the GLUT library from SGI, but this has not been completely installed as yet. For all machines, the libraries are installed in /p/lib/Mesa. There is also a set of common include files to be used with these libraries in /p/include/Mesa. Documentation for the libraries is to be found in /p/doc/Mesa, which has four subdirectories of interest, mangl, manglu, manglx and doc. The first three contain man pages for MesaGL, MesaGLU and MesaGLX respectively, and doc contains papers describing these libraries at a higher level. All of these documents are in postscript format, which means that the man program cannot be used to read the man pages. Instead, I recommend using the command `gs -- filename.ps' to read these postscript files. The man pages are also available in html on the web.
There is also an extensive set of demo programs available for you to look at and play with. The source code for these can be found in /p/src/Mesa/demos, /p/src/Mesa/book, /p/src/Mesa/samples and /p/src/Mesa/widgets/demos. In each of these directories there is a subdirectory for each of the deparmental machine types. These contain executable files for the demo programs on each type of machine, so you should be able to verify that you can execute these demos on whatever machine you are using. Once you have done that, try copying the source code for a few of the more interesting programs to your own account and building the demos using the makefile . DO NOT attempt to use the makefiles in the /p/src/Mesa directory tree, they won't work with the installed libraries and include files. To use our local makefile, you will have to uncomment the appropriate lines for the machine you are trying to compile on, and you will have to edit the `PROGS =' line to list the programs you are trying to compile. Note that the program names to be listed there are the object module names, which should be identical to the source filenames with the `.c' extension removed.
Please report any problems you have in this procedure to me, by email, at fussell@cs.utexas.edu and cc your message to the TA nishant@cs.utexas.edu. Also, please try this as soon as you can, so that you will quickly learn how to get around in Mesa and will be ready to do the programming projects. You might want to try these exercises on several machines before you decide what to use. The IBMs are the fastest processors, but will probably be the slowest machines for using Mesa since all graphics will have to be done over the net from the server machines to the Xstations. All of these machines run under Xwindows, so you should be able to run Mesa on any machine, with a window on any other machine on the net. This is not recommended, however, since the net will become a bottleneck.