14 DAY TRIAL // Canonical's Timo Aaltonen announced earlier the availability of the latest Mesa 17.0.2 3D Graphics Library packages in his personal package archive (PPA) for Ubuntu 16.04 LTS and Ubuntu 16.10.
Ubuntu 16.04 LTS and 16.04.1 LTS (Xenial Xerus) users who haven't managed to upgrade their installations to the Ubuntu 16.04.2 LTS release, which ships with updated kernel and graphics stacks from Ubuntu 16.10 (Yakkety Yak), are still relying on third-party PPAs for the latest Mesa builds.
Canonical is still providing unsupported Mesa versions on the Ubuntu 16.04 LTS and 16.04.1 LTS repositories, from the 11.x series, as well as Mesa 12.x on the Ubuntu 16.04.2 LTS and Ubuntu 16.10 repos, while the company managed to bring the recently released Mesa 17.0.2 to the upcoming Ubuntu 17.04 (Zesty Zapus) OS.
Here's how to install Mesa 17.0.2 on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS and Ubuntu 16.10
If you're using Ubuntu 16.04 LTS or Ubuntu 16.10 on your personal computer, Timo Aaltonen managed to backport the latest Mesa 17.0.2 release from Ubuntu 17.04 compiled against LLVM 3.9.1 and 4.0 on the "Ubuntu-X" team PPA. Users can install it by running the following commands in the Terminal app.
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-x-swat/updates -y
sudo apt update && sudo apt dist-upgrade
"Mesa 17.0.2 backports can now be installed from the updates PPA. Have fun testing, and feel free to file any bugs you find using ‘apport-bug mesa’," said the developer on his personal blog. No restart is required for installing Mesa 17.0.2, but if you may need to reboot your PC if there was an older kernel update available.
Of course, hardcore gamers will most probably prefer to rely on the third-party Padoka or Oibaf PPAs, which provide bleeding-edge Mesa 17.1 graphics drivers compiling against LLVM 5.0 (only Padoka) and LLVM 4.0 (only Oibaf). On the other hand, it looks like Canonical won't be able to upgrade the graphics stack to the new X.Org Server 1.19 series for Ubuntu 17.04, nor other supported Ubuntu releases.