Re: Graphics Card/GL

["Júlio Maranhão" <julio_maranhao(at)hotmail.com>]

Karl,

Thank you for your explanation.
Now it's clear IDL doesn't use hardware accel in Linux and it's almost
impossible to set it up now (at least for NVidia).
Maybe the Voodoo cards owners could set it, since Mesa supports hard accel
for these cards. But as you told it depends on rebuilding the Mesa sources
and tuning some flags. And it may not work and, of course, there will be no
official support.

I think I will be with win98 for 3D work in IDL. ;-).

Cheers.

Júlio Maranhão.


"Karl Schultz" <kschultz@researchsystems.com> wrote in message
9g88bj$106$1@news.rsinc.com">news:9g88bj$106$1@news.rsinc.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
>
>
>