OSMesa
The minimum required version of OSMesa for Octave is 9.0.0
OSMesa versions < 9.0 show a strange bug where the return values of
glGetIntegerv (GL_DEPTH_BITS, &z); glGetIntegerv (GL_STENCIL_BITS, &s); glGetIntegerv (GL_ACCUM_RED_BITS, &a);
contain arbitrary values and the rendered buffer is garbage. This only happens if OSMesa is linked together with Octave, standalone OSMesa examples works fine.
On Debian GNU/Linux 8.0 (jessie), Ubuntu 14.04 (trusty) and Fedora 21 there is no need to build OSMesa from source, just use your package manager which installs libosmesa > 10.0.
Build OSMesa from source
Needed for example for Debian wheezy or Ubuntu 12.04.5 which ships OSMesa 8.0.5.
wget -nc ftp://ftp.freedesktop.org/pub/mesa/current/MesaLib-10.2.2.tar.bz2 tar xjf MesaLib-10.2.2.tar.bz2 cd Mesa-10.2.2/ autoreconf -fi ./configure \ CXXFLAGS="-O2 -g -DDEFAULT_SOFTWARE_DEPTH_BITS=31" \ CFLAGS="-O2 -g -DDEFAULT_SOFTWARE_DEPTH_BITS=31" \ --disable-xvmc \ --disable-glx \ --disable-dri \ --with-dri-drivers="" \ --with-gallium-drivers="" \ --enable-texture-float \ --disable-shared-glapi \ --disable-egl \ --with-egl-platforms="" \ --enable-osmesa \ --enable-gallium-llvm=no \ --prefix=/usr/local/mesa/10.2.2/classic make -j4 # optional make check sudo make install