Installing OpenGL + GLUT on Kubuntu 9.04

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Tags: opengl, ubuntu, kubuntu, computer graphics, UCSC

I'm taking a Computer Graphics class, and during the first week we need to install OpenGL and write a first, very simple program. I looked around for tutorials and couldn't find any simple ones, so I've compiled one below.

This tutorial should help you install OpenGL + Glut on Debian-based Linux distributions.

My OS: Kubuntu 9.04 i386 (32 bit)

Installing GLUT:

sudo apt-get install freeglut3 glut-doc

In my case, I had to install an nvidia driver as well:

sudo apt-get install nvidia-glx-180-dev

For some of you, this might not be the case, and the mesa-common package would work:

sudo apt-get install mesa-common-dev

Then (and here's the part that got me worried), you can try testing a simple example, but I got this error:

OpenGL GLX extension not supported by display ':0.0'

To fix this, it was much simpler than I thought -- I just needed to reboot. (If you don't want to, for some reason, restarting X should work just fine.) If this problem doesn't go away, I found a couple of resources in my search before rebooting, here and here.

After setting this up, I looked up tutorials, and decided to use this simple example: (found here)

#include <GL/glut.h>

#define window_width  640
#define window_height 480

// Main loop
void main_loop_function()
{
   // Z angle
   static float angle;
   // Clear color (screen)
   // And depth (used internally to block obstructed objects)
   glClear(GL_COLOR_BUFFER_BIT | GL_DEPTH_BUFFER_BIT);
   // Load identity matrix
   glLoadIdentity();
   // Multiply in translation matrix
   glTranslatef(0,0, -10);
   // Multiply in rotation matrix
   glRotatef(angle, 0, 0, 1);
   // Render colored quad
   glBegin(GL_QUADS);
   glColor3ub(255, 000, 000); glVertex2f(-1,  1);
   glColor3ub(000, 255, 000); glVertex2f( 1,  1);
   glColor3ub(000, 000, 255); glVertex2f( 1, -1);
   glColor3ub(255, 255, 000); glVertex2f(-1, -1);
   glEnd();
   // Swap buffers (color buffers, makes previous render visible)
    glutSwapBuffers();
   // Increase angle to rotate
   angle+=0.25;
}

// Initialze OpenGL perspective matrix
void GL_Setup(int width, int height)
{

    glViewport( 0, 0, width, height );
    glMatrixMode( GL_PROJECTION );
    glEnable( GL_DEPTH_TEST );
    gluPerspective( 45, (float)width/height, .1, 100 );
    glMatrixMode( GL_MODELVIEW );
}

// Initialize GLUT and start main loop
int main(int argc, char** argv) {
    glutInit(&argc, argv);

    glutInitWindowSize(window_width, window_height);

    glutInitDisplayMode(GLUT_RGB | GLUT_DOUBLE);

    glutCreateWindow("GLUT Example!!!");

    glutIdleFunc(main_loop_function);

    GL_Setup(window_width, window_height);
   glutMainLoop();
}

Thanks! I'm eager to update this tutorial with more information, so if you're having problems, let me know!

Additional resources: