How to update Mesa

Mesa is the open source library on Linux that provides the OpenGL implementation for programs. The Mesa library installed by Ubuntu can be pretty old. For example, my Mesa library showed support for the archaic OpenGL 2.1 standard.

Thankfully, there is a PPA that provides updated Mesa libraries. Updating is easy:

$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:oibaf/graphics-drivers
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

Remember to reboot the computer after this update. I found that Mesa supported OpenGL 3.0 after this update! 😄

Tried with: Mesa 11.1 and Ubuntu 14.04