[ Thanks to David Culp
for this link. ]
“…Walk into nearly any book store and go look at the graphics
programming section. What you will see is a plethora of books
covering graphics programming under Windows and close to none
covering graphics programming under Linux. The closest book I know
of that covers graphics under Linux is the Open GL Programming
guide and it is not Linux specific but covers the compilation and
running of Open GL programs on a Linux box. Coriolis has released
the first and hopefully not the last book that specifically covers
graphics programming under Linux.”
“…The book is rated as being suitable for beginners to
advanced programmers. I would agree with that, however beginners
and those not well versed in math (most of the book requires only
simple math) will not be able to follow everything in the
book. The beginning of the book is the most useful and most
informative as far as basic SVGAlib programming is concerned.
Chapters one through seven will lead you through setting up SVGAlib
on your machine and configuring it to work with your particular
graphics card. SVGAlib comes precompiled and is installed by
default on nearly every distribution, however I decided to
uninstall SVGAlib and compile from source following the books
instructions. I was unable to compile and install SVGAlib. I do not
believe it was an error in the books instructions though, the
compiler would halt with an error during compilation. I reinstalled
the rpms from the Mandrake installation CD and everything worked
fine. The very first program in the book appears in chapter 2 and
when you run it it will inform you of what video modes your card
supports. I noticed immediately that it was telling me my card (a
Voodoo 3 3000) only supported low resolution and low color video
modes. I edited the the /etc/vga/libvga.config file to tell SVGA to
use the Banshee/Voodoo 3 drivers and reran the program, my machine
crashed hard each time I tried. So, I reedited the config file to
use the VESA driver and I was up and running in hi-res mode!”