VTK:How I mangled Mesa

Abstract

This document describes the steps I took to build VTK (Visualization toolkit) with support the mangled Mesa libraries for VTK 4. *NEW* For details on mangling mesa for VTK 5.0 and Mesa 6.5.3, follow this link [[1]]

Introduction

If you use VTK and you're like me, you sometimes like to do your rendering offscreen in the software, right? Offscreen rendering is useful for a number of things, such as batch processing, parallel processing, and remote processing. VTK has functionality to perform these sorts of operations through the Mesa 3D library. Unfortunately, documentation on how to build VTK and enable support for offscreen rendering is sparse and incomplete. I will attempt to provide a clear explanation from start to finish how to setup VTK with support for Mesa for offscreen rendering.

Get the software

First move to the directory in which you plan to do the installing. I like using /usr/local/src and installing as the root user.

  su - 
  cd /usr/local/src

Download VTK and Mesa from their respective sources. You can get these libraries from the commandline using wget:

  wget http://www.vtk.org/files/release/4.2/moved_to_sourceforge/VTK-4.2-LatestRelease.tar.gz
  wget http://internap.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/mesa3d/MesaLib-5.0.2.tar.gz

Keep in mind that these files are from January 2005. You may have to look somewhere else to get them in the future. The next step is to extract the archives. I rename VTK to vtk-4.2.3 to keep it separate from my other vtk source installations.

  tar xzvf MesaLib-5.0.2.tar.gz
  tar xzvf VTK-4.2-LatestRelease.tar.gz