Talk:OpenGL

I think we should steer people away from using Mesa. Yeah, its open source and everything, but most people looking for information here will just want their OpenGL acceleration, and not care that they are using binary only drivers. Thus, IMHO, we should put the official links to NVIDIA and ATI at the top, saying: this is probably what you want. And then continue with a discussion on the Mesa libs, etc.

I remember being hella confused when I first started trying to get OpenGL working under Linux. I had no clue as to if I needed Mesa or not, but it turned out I just needed the drivers from NVIDIA.

Software rendering sucks... having people install/use this will NOT make them impressed about Linux in general.

Costyn

I don't agree, Mesa also does 3d hardware accelerated rendering. And not everybody has got an ATI or Nvidia card! Mesa provides 3d hw accel for most of the xfree86 drivers, and comes installed as default with most distros. This page does however need some better explaination of the situation :)

Hmmm... I guess I need to be better informed as well. :-) I was under the impression that the Mesa library stuff was for software rendering. That all accelerated drivers came with their own GL library, like the NVIDIA and ATI drivers. This has always been a confusing issue to me. I completely agree with you that this page needs restructuring. But it would have to be done by someone with good knowledge of all tech involved.

Costyn

I'll see what I can do with it. It will be difficult to not make it too technical. Also not sure what to do with the 3d acceleration page, since 3d acceleration isn't limited to openGL only. And openGL itself can also be used without X, which would add even more confusion :)

Jor

Why mention XFS? it's got not much to do with openGL, and if you feel it should be there why not KDB, Famd, etc?

Jor