Hi, I am relatively inexperienced concerning C++ development on linux but while trying to sum up 3D Application Development I seem to be slightly confused concerning Mesa3D.
Does Panda3D use Mesa3D to render under linux? Is it the only opengl implementation? Is it the fastest implementation? Would it be suitable to use for a fully blown native linux 3D application along the lines of the Source Engine( Half Life 2) Or Quake 4?
For Linux, the major graphics card manufacturers write their hardware interface layer below the Mesa OpenGL-based interface. This means that even if you have the proper 3-D accelerated drivers installed, at least some part of the driver is using Mesa, so you may see some reference to Mesa in the logs.
On the other hand, most Linux distros don’t seem to ship with 3-D accelerated drivers, so they run full software Mesa by default. It is a very common problem in Linux to be running in software mode only because you don’t have the right drivers installed.
Bottom line: Mesa may or may not be hardware-accelerated under Linux. And if it’s not hardware-accelerated, you don’t really want to run any of the hardcore 3-D games.
David
small addition 
some linux distros started to ship drivers,too. like sabayon or freespire.
the only manufactor which provides good enough drivers to run those full blown 3d applications at the moment is Nvidia. Ati (or AMD) is improving now but is still far behind.
i might be wront but to me it looks like the drivers come with the opengl stuff. without drivers i can only use mesa. with drivers the opengl drivers seems to be nvidia-labled. same with ati.
well in one sentence. get a Nvidia card, install the proprietary drivers, have fun playing games. their drivers are as good and fast as their windows ones and even quake4 and such games are running fine . thats not true for most other vendors.
oh… dont even think about software rendering &realtime 
…except you have less than a few hundret untextured faces in a small window
Hope this links help you-
itu.dk/courses/SSPG/E2005/links.html