Re: [Closed REQ 6065]: Geomview

[daemon]

> In the process, I have found reference to versions that use
> MESA open gl.  I get the impression that Sun versions use 
> Geomview with Mesa; is Mesa the package of choice to take the
> output from Geomview and display it?  Is Geomview a package built on Mesa?

It's not necessarily built on Mesa, though some versions of geomview use it.  
Geomview can be compiled with any of several graphics drivers.  One of these
uses an Open GL library, a graphics standard promulgated by Silicon Graphics,
to render 3-D objects into images.  There are several implementations of
Open GL, of which one (not strictly Open GL since they haven't bought a license,
but it's a good imitation) is the free Mesa Open-GL-like library.
Mesa renders images internally and sends them to an X window as an array
of colored pixels.

Another driver was written by Daeron Meyer and Tim Rowley here; like Mesa,
it renders images into memory internally and sends the pixels to an X window.
It's faster than Mesa -- maybe twice as fast -- but doesn't run on some
(unusual) types of X displays, and doesn't support some features that
Mesa does, like transparency or texture mapping.

When you pick up the geomview for the Sun, the command "geomview"
invokes the copy that uses Meyer and Rowley's renderer, not Mesa.
But if you type "geomview -opengl", it will invoke the Mesa version -- the
distribution includes both.

In any case, the graphics driver is built into geomview when you get it --
if you retrieve the binary distribution, you won't need to add anything else
to see the pictures geomview creates.