Mesa (why does their website use frames?) is an open source 3D graphics library based on the OGL specification. It's been around since 1993 and is still in regular development, making it quite popular for scientific applications.

Firstly, download the library tarball (or equivalent) from sourceforge and unpack (e.g., tar xvf MesaLib-7.4.tar.gz)n a standard directory (/usr/local/src/MESA. Change in to that directory, load a gcc module (module load gcc) and configure with an appropriate directory prefix (./configure --prefix=/usr/local/mesa/7.4-gcc).

You may get a warning concerning libdrm versions as mesa prefers version >= 2.4.15. You can ignore this, or you can download libdrm, build, create a module etc. Or you can live with the version you have.

Secondly, Mesa is apparently a bit fussy. Start with a make realclean, which removes core files, object files etc., and executables from the build directory. Now make the 32-bit version with make linux-x86-32 and install it in the appropriate directory (make install INSTALL_DIR=/usr/local/mesa/VERSION/.

Repeat the process for the 64-bit version (make realclean, make linux-x86-64, make install INSTALL_DIR=/usr/local/mesa/VERSION/).

Create a module file (cd /usr/local/Modules/modulefiles/mesa/, ln -s .base 7.4-gcc).

And that's it!

NOTA BENE: Mesa v7.8.1 includes a fix for a significant error in Mesa's copy of glxext.h and the libGL code that uses it... However, do not do the module load gcc/4.4.2 stage described above. Use the default gcc install, i.e., gcc version 4.1.2.