Re: Graphics Card/GL

["Karl Schultz" <kschultz(at)researchsystems.com>]

Júlio,

On a Linux system, IDL 5.4 does NOT try to use any of the
OpenGL or Mesa libraries that you may have installed on your Linux system.
So, basically, IDL ignores any effort you may make with configuring
OpenGL/Mesa on your system.  Instead, IDL simply uses the Mesa
libraries that come with IDL.

One way to tell if IDL attempts to use the OpenGL libraries is to look
for the existance of a "gl_driver.so" file in the IDL binary directory.
Most Unix IDL distributions have this file.  Those that do not are
for those platforms that do not have OpenGL support or those platforms
that do not have stable enough OpenGL support to run IDL.

Linux is one of these platforms for IDL 5.4.  At the time IDL 5.4 was
released, the OpenGL support story on Linux was pretty incomplete
and unstable.  So, IDL 5.4 won't try to use the OpenGL libs on
your Linux.

The Mesa story is a bit more complicated still.  In short, you need
to rebuild Mesa from source with some additional flags set.
If you are *really* interested in doing this, please contact me
directly.

Karl Schultz
RSI