-- StephenNickerson - 28 Feb 2011

Introduction

The OpenGL spec has recently been updated to version 2.1. Included with that is something called shading which allows one to represent different surfaces, give them a look of real world materials like rubber, skin, metal, etc. In technical terms, as described in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GLSL it allows programmers to control _endering pipelines using vertex and pixel shaders_. In the past programmers needed to be conversant on assembly language level to be able to modify these attributes of the graphics card but higher level languages have been introduced, an example of which is Cg, developed by Nvidia.

Want to install the latest Nvidia drivers under Ubuntu/Edgy Eft? Apparently going to http://albertomilone.com/driver_edgy.html is a good option (I haven't tried this), or http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=281823 or http://albertomilone.com/nvidia_scripts1.html all by the same author, for latest see his blog at http://albertomilone.com/wordpress/.

References

• C for Graphics, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cg_programming_language
• GLSL - See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GLSL. It stands for OpenGL Shading Language. It become part of the OpenGL spec with version 2.0.

• GLX - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GLX
• Home of OpenGL - see http://www.opengl.org, especially http://www.opengl.org/documentation/specs/
• MESA - see http://www.mesa3d.org/, the open source implementation of
• OpenGL specs, albeit it's not officially sanctioned as such but it implements the same functions. Version 6.5 of Mesa introduced support for LGSL. Current version in Edgy is 6.5.1. Version in dapper was 6.4.1 which did not have shading support. As this implementation is in software it isn't as fast as the binaries drivers as provided by the Debian packages nvidia-glx and the Nvidia drivers provided by the linux-restricted-modules package. In short we don't use mesa and never have.

• Xgl - an X server, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xgl, that has OpenGL capabilities built in. Probably not a good option since it would suck resources?
• Beryl Project, see http://www.beryl-project.org/
• AiGLX - see http://wiki.beryl-project.org/index.php/Install/Ubuntu/Edgy/AiGLX
• Ubuntu Guide - see http://ubuntuguide.org/wiki/Ubuntu_Edgy has some notes on installing graphics drivers

-- WalterTautz - 15 Dec 2006