The Mesa 3D Graphics Library

# Downloading and Unpacking

## Downloading

You can download the released versions of Mesa via HTTPS or FTP.

Starting with the first release of 2017, Mesa's version scheme is year-based. Filenames are in the form `mesa-Y.N.P.tar.gz`, where `Y` is the year (two digits), `N` is an incremental number (starting at 0) and `P` is the patch number (0 for the first release, 1 for the first patch after that).

When a new release is coming, release candidates (betas) may be found in the same directory, and are recognisable by the `mesa-Y.N.P-rcX.tar.gz` filename.

## Unpacking

Mesa releases are available in two formats: `.tar.xz` and `.tar.gz`.

To unpack the tarball:

    	tar xf mesa-Y.N.P.tar.xz

or

    	tar xf mesa-Y.N.P.tar.gz

## Contents

Proceed to the compilation and installation instructions.

## Demos, GLUT, and GLU

A package of SGI's GLU library is available here

A package of Mark Kilgard's GLUT library is available here

The Mesa demos collection is available here

In the past, GLUT, GLU and the Mesa demos were released in conjunction with Mesa releases. But since GLUT, GLU and the demos change infrequently, they were split off into their own git repositories: GLUT, GLU and Demos,