Mesa, GGI, etc

[Joel Stanley <jstanley@up.edu>]

Hi folks. In the beginnings of experimentation with graphics stuff (for
the first time, ever :) I've run into a few problems which I'm sure are
due to ignorance on my part.

First of all, I'm running the 2.2.0pre7 kernel, and use the egcs-1.1.1
compiler for all of my development. The last few nights I've been trying
to get Mesa and LibGGI/GII shared libraries installed, but to no avail.
I've come up with the following questions that (hopefully) someone in the
know could give me a hand with:

1. libggi.so (and all other libraries associated with GGI) have been
compiled and installed into various places (/usr/local/lib, mostly). I've
added entries to /etc/ld.so.conf for the directories in which they are
installed, and of course run ldconfig -v, which sees the desired
libraries. However, when I try to compile some of the demos which come
with ggi, I get unresolved symbol errors when gcc gets to the link phase.
I can get around it by manually linking to the .so file, but that's a pain
in the ass. Putting the path in LD_LIBRARY_PATH doesn't seem to help
matters, either. I'm also getting an unresolved symbol when attempting to
compile the C source which has functions used from math.h (sin, cos, sqrt,
etc)...which is _very_ odd imho. I don't have the same problem if I use
g++ to compile.

2. General GGI question. The GGI homepage explicitly states that a kernel
patch is not required to use GGI. My question is if they mean you can
write code using the ggi libraries without a kernel patch? The GGI
libraries are apparently installed, but the GGI demos that I've been able
to compile and run are _amazingly_ slow under X and don't want to run from
the console. Do I need to patch my kernel to actually take advantage
of what GGI has to offer? I've got a 3dfx card and a Matrox Millenium 
which provide fast and snappy high-resolution graphics and I'd like
to be able to configure everything well enough that the hardware is
used whenever possible. Could someone with GGI experience help me out a
bit here? If I don't have any luck here I'll certainly try the ggi mailing
list, but the less mailbox spam the better :)

3. Glide. I still haven't found a good definition of what this is. I know
it relates to OpenGL/Mesa somehow but I can't figure it out for the life
of me. Is it a GL extension specific to the Voodoo chipset...or what? :)

I guess that's about it for now. Sorry for the newbie-type questions, not
everyone on this list is a coding god :-}

Joel

--
Joel R. Stanley                   *  jstanley@up.edu       
http://rainier.up.edu/~jstanley   *  #include <std_disclaimer.h>