XFree86 uses DRI http://dri.sourceforge.net
and http://www.mesa3d.org
for its OpenGL hardware acceleration.
The status page over at the DRI site lists your card as one that has drivers available for it, so XFree86/DRI/Mesa OpenGL rendering should work just fine.
Looking at the output of your glxinfo:
> direct rendering: Yes
Yes. DRI is working.
> OpenGL version string: 1.2 Mesa 3.4.2
Yup. You’re running Mandrake 8.2. Same as me.
> What does it mean??
It means you’re chillin’ like Bob Dylan. That is to say, you should have full OpenGL-accelerated opensource drivers installed, and they seem to be working. Try tuxracer and see for yourself.
As for developing your own OpenGL programs,… do this:
cd /usr/X11R6/lib
ls libGL*
Is your libGL.so.x present? It should be. Along with libGLU as well. These are what you’ll link to when linking your own OpenGL programs.
In your /usr/X11R6/include directory, there should be a GL subdirectory containing the GL include files. This has always shown up in my Mandrake installs. If it’s not there, I’d suggest you:
-
go to the mesa3d download area at sourceforge and download the Mesa 3.4.2 files (yes, they have older versions like 3.4.2) to some temp directory in your ~.
-
su to root
-
create a GL directory in /usr/X11R6/include if it’s not there already, and
-
copy just the include files you want into /usr/X11R6/include/GL. These are gl.h and glu.h for now (I think).
Alternatively, you might use one of the Mandrake packaging tools to get some sort of mesa-dev package in place. One thing about that worries me though:
Mesa is really a 2 headed beast. It’s used in one capacity as a software-based OpenGL renderer (I think I’m using that word correctly here). This is so you can have your CPU handle OpenGL programs on a computer without a video card that has OpenGL drivers.
Mesa is also the core component of the DRI system to handle hardware acceleration with OpenGL. A corollary to this is, you can’t just upgrade Mesa on your system, because, with stand-alone Mesa, you’ll just get the software-renderer. If you want to upgrade the version of mesa on your system, you need to upgrade the whole shebang (X/DRI/Mesa) all in one shot. I’m waiting for XFree86 4.3 to come out so I can do this.
So, if you’re using the package management tools on Mandrake, just be careful that you don’t replace your nice wired-in libGL.so (with hardware OpenGL acceleration), with the software rendering one.
—John
[This message has been edited by jmg (edited 12-09-2002).]