[Paraview] Confused of offscreen rendering, mangled mesa,

[Amy Squillacote]

Hi Weiguang,

Please see the following thread from the vtkusers list: 
http://public.kitware.com/pipermail/vtkusers/2007-January/088857.html. 
Part of the discussion also appeared on the ParaView and vtk-developers 
lists.

If the only version of GL on your cluster is Mesa, then you can set your 
OpenGL-related CMake variables to point to the appropriate counterpart 
in Mesa. The reason you'd want to use mangled Mesa is if from the same 
build, sometimes you'd want to use OpenGL and other times you'd want to 
use Mesa. It doesn't sound like that's the case for you.

- Amy

Weiguang Guan wrote:
> Hi paraview/VTK experts,
>
> I was working on building/running Paraview on a cluster without 
> graphics card a while ago, and now I want to resume the unfinished 
> task...
>
> I have some questions related to the above-mentioned task:
>
> (1) Mesa is a pure software implementation of OpenGL standard. Is Mesa 
> the only choice for offscreen rendering?
>
> (2) If I want to build and run Paraview on a computing cluster, any 
> node of which doesn't have graphics card installed, do I have to build 
> Paraview with mangled Mesa? If the cluster doesn't have any other 
> OpenGL lib installed, then do I have to "mangle" Mesa?
>
> (3) If I build Paraview with mangled Mesa, can I see rendering from 
> Paraview or is it offscreen exclusive?
>
> Thank you in advance.
>
> Weiguang