Following last month's release of Mesa 7.1, Tungsten Graphics began working on Mesa 7.2, which is a stabilized version of this OpenGL implementation that had picked up 3D support for the ATI Radeon R500 and Intel GMA 4-Series.

Ubuntu 9.10 had its beta release last week and the final release is coming in just three weeks, but this late in the release cycle, it has been decided to pull in the final Mesa 7.6 version. Pulling in this newer code that provides OpenGL acceleration on Linux provides numerous bug-fixes along with support for a greater number of OpenGL extensions on different hardware and other improvements.

There is now talk on the Mesa 3D development list about the possibility of having a Mesa driver for the Nintendo Wii. Those working on developing custom games for this console platform have already experienced some success in bringing OpenGL to the Wii through the use of Mesa.

While the 3.0 revision to this industry standard graphics API has been around for nearly three years, it's still not fully supported by the open-source Mesa graphics stack. Progress though is being made.

After being in development for a number of months and being challenged by a few delays, Mesa 7.5 was officially released last night. What's most significant about this milestone is that it's the first release to include the Gallium3D architecture.

As we shared a few days ago, Fedora 13 will provide OpenGL acceleration support for NVIDIA graphics cards via the Nouveau driver when installing the Mesa DRI experimental drivers package. There is finally 3D acceleration for NVIDIA graphics cards using an open-source driver on Linux without having to depend upon NVIDIA's official binary driver.

From the release of Mesa 7.1 Release Candidate 1 to Multi-Pointer X being merged to master to the R500 3D milestone, it's been an exciting past 24 hours for the X.Org community.

This week at the X Developers' Conference there was a talk surrounding OpenGL 3.x and its lack of complete support within the latest Mesa code. While development manpower can end up be limiting, there are also some patent / legal issues surrounding this with regard to some parts of core OpenGL being covered by such inhibitive patents.

For those that missed it, there was quite a bit happening this week in the Linux world when it comes to graphics drivers. The KMS page-flipping ioctl is ready for the Linux 2.6.32 kernel, KMS and GEM comes to the Neo FreeRunner, and the Assembly shader rework was merged into the mainline Mesa tree was among the open-source driver news.