Installing OpenGL

You need to install an environment on your hardware where you can compile and run OpenGL programs. OpenGL is supported on most modern operating systems, but how to compile and link programs varies greatly. The description below assumes that you already have a compilation environment set up.

Before asking for help, look at the Troubleshooting hints to localize the problem rather than asking a meaningless question like It doesn't work.

Linux

OpenGL support is very easy to enable on current Linux distributions. For distributions derived from RedHat Linux, the libraries and header files are installed using the command

yum install freeglut-devel

Since GLUT depends on OpenGL and a number of other libraries, installing GLUT will trigger the dependencies needed to install everything else. For distributions derived from Debian such as Ubuntu, the installation command is

apt-get install freeglut3-dev

To compile and link your program all that is required is

gcc -o foo foo.c -lglut

On some Ubuntu based distros you need to explicitly grab GLU using

gcc -o foo foo.c -lglut -lGLU

Older distributions may put the files in /usr/X11R6, in which case you need to add -I and -L flags to pick up the header files and libraries.

Once installed, run the glxinfo program and look for direct rendering in the output. If the result is YES, then hardware support for OpenGL is working. If it is NO, some things are done in software and you may take a performance hit. Depending on your hardware, you may want to work on your X server. Specifically, the nVidia and AMD/ATI web sites contains updated drivers that result in improved performance over the stock Xorg drivers.

The compiz window manager (which is an OpenGL window manager) makes applications which use glutIdleFunc() run jerky unless you enable VSync. This seems to be an issue especially with newer Ubuntu installs.

OS/X

The OS/X Darwin environment is based on OpenGL. Therefore any compilation environment for OS/X should already support compiling OpenGL programs.

To compile and link your program using the Apple SDK requires

gcc -o foo foo.c -framework GLUT -framework OpenGL

Note that under OS/X, the GLUT header files are in the subdirectory GLUT rather than the GL subdirectory. The following code works on OSX and Linux

#ifdef __APPLE__
#include <GLUT/glut.h>
#else
#include <GL/glut.h>
#endif

Windows

Various Windows versions support OpenGL natively, but graphics card manufacturers often replace the native Windows OpenGL libraries with their own libraries that support specific features of their hardware.

Since most Windows environments do not contain a native compilation suite, installing the necessary header files and libraries differs depending on the compiler used. You may also need to install GLUT from Nate Robins.

Windows: MinGW

If you don't have a compiliation environment on Windows, you can install MinGW which provides the gcc compiler for Windows.

Download and install MinGW. Accept all the defaults, except that you also should install "make". After the installation is completed, change directories to C:\MinGW\bin and rename mingw32-make.exe to make.exe to avoid having to type mingw32-make every time you want to use make. You should also add C:\MinGW\bin to your PATH.

Finally, install GLUT by unzipping my version of GLUT into C:\MinGW. It will provide include\GL\glut.h and lib\libglut32cu.a needed to use GLUT. It also provides glut32.dll. Move glut32.dll to C:\windows\system32 so that the system can find this DLL at run time.

Note that my version of GLUT has been patched to provide glWIndowPos which otherwise would not be available on Windows systems which support OpenGL version 1.1.

To compile and link foo.c under MinGW you need

gcc -Wall -ofoo foo.c -lglut32cu -lglu32 -lopengl32

Windows: DevC++

Jeremy Salter provided this writup for installing OpenGL with DevC++.

Windows: Other

Your Windows system may provide OpenGL 1.1, which dates from 1995. This version will not contain the glWindowPos functions which I use a lot. You can provide the same functionality in software by including this code in your build. DO NOT include this code in what you submit, as it will result in a conflict in Linux or OSX systems. You do not need to install this code if you use the glut32cu library described above as this library already adds this code.

Troubleshooting hints

If you are having trouble getting the programs to compile, you may want to consider these things to determine if the problem is in your compiler, header files or linker/libraries.

Try compiling the classic C program that prints Hello World! to the screen to check that your compiler and linker works in the absence of OpenGL. If this fails to compile and run, your compile environment is broken and needs to be fixed before you can work on getting OpenGL to work.
Try compiling ex5.c. If you get errors like
error: GL/glut.h: No such file or directory
or
error: 'GL_COLOR_BUFFER_BIT' undeclared
the compiler cannot find yout OpenGL header files. Check that the files are in an expected place like /usr/include/GL or use the -I compiler flag to tell the compiler where it is.
Try linking ex5.c.
undefined reference to 'glut... means the GLUT library was not found.
undefined reference to 'glu... means the GLU library was not found.
undefined reference to 'gl... means the GL library was not found.
Make sure the libraries are in an expected place like /usr/lib or /usr/lib64 or use the -L flag to tell the linker where it is.
If you get warning: implicit declaration of function 'glWindowPos2i' try adding
#define GL_GLEXT_PROTOTYPES
before any includes.
If you get undefined reference to glWindowPos2i you may have an old GL library. Link in my glWindowPos code or use glut32cu.a with MinGW.
If you use C++, be aware that sometimes the compiler does name mangling on the file names while glut32cu is plain C which does not do name maningling and may not provide all the entry points.