Installing OpenGL

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

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 on Ubuntu based distros you need to explicitly grab every library using

gcc -o foo foo.c -lglut -lGLU -lGL -lm

I recommend that you use this full version even if not required on your system. 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. On Ubuntu using the Additional Drivers integrates the vendor drivers with the Ubuntu kernels, which is the recommended procedure to void manual updates when the kernel is upgraded.

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

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

On recent versions of OSX, you will get many warnings indicating that GLUT is deprecated. You can suppress these spurious warnings using the compiler flag

-Wno-deprecated-declarations

Windows

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 FreeGLUT.

Windows: MinGW

Download and install MinGW. Accept the default install location C:\MinGW and install mingw32-base, mingw32-gcc-g++ and msys-base. 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 the beginning of 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 bin\glut32.dll. To find glut32.dll at run time it must be in the PATH, so including C:\MinGW\bin in the PATH is critical.

Note that my version of GLUT has been patched to provide glWindowPos2i 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

Note that my makefiles assumes that you have the MinGW environment.

Windows: MinGW and GLEW

1. Make sure that you have a working MinGW OpenGL environment as described above. These instructions assume you installed it in the default location C:\MinGW\lib.
2. Download the GLEW source from here and unzip it.
3. In order to build GLEW, you need a Unix shell. If you installed MinGW as described above, it would have installed MSYS. To temporarily use MSYS add it to your path using the command PATH=C:\MinGW\msys\1.0\bin;%PATH%. Then start a shell by typing bash.
4. Use the cd command to change the current directory to where you unpacked GLEW. Note the folder C:\foo\bar is called /c/foo/bar in MSYS.
5. Compile GLEW using the command make. The makefile should automatically detect that you are using MinGW. If you get a link error, you may need to edit the Makefile as shown here to remove the redunant -nostdlib reference.
6. Install GLEW using the command make GLEW_DEST=/c/mingw install. This will put the header files in C:\MinGW\include and the libraries in C:\MinGW\lib.
7. You can now close the window. GLEW will be available from a regular command prompt.

gcc -DUSEGLEW -Wall -ofoo foo.c -lglew32 -lglut32cu -lglu32 -lopengl32

The -DUSEGLEW compiler flag defines the USEGLEW variable which my codes use to conditionally compile in GLEW.

Windows with VM

Windows: DevC++

Windows: Other

• 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 your 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.