FreeNX GLX or Software Rendering (Mesa)

I have worked the last couple of weeks with FreeNX and GLX. That was really slow and we constantly reduced the number of polygons. So today I tried to use software rendering (Mesa) because NX is optimized for 2D transfers.

The result is that the interaction was much faster but in the full resolution not that fast. I tried to monitor the processes to see if it's a problem of the computer power or the network -- I am slightly thinking it's a network problem though.

Maybe I need to run tests with different test data, too. I don't know how representative a 200 slice MRI image of a human head is;-)

Anyway we will go forward with this solution but I will keep my slider to reduce the resolution (e.g. details) just in case...

How did I get the software render on the machine?
Given that we are using VTK I just had to replace the system's OpenGL with Mesa's one

1. I first compiled Mesa in my home directory (target linux-x86)
   
2. replaced in VTK's ccmake (use "t" for the expert mode) all references to OpenGL libraries with the newly created ones
   
3. recompiled VTK
   
4. tested the application