installing Freeglut on Linux

Question

I am trying to install freeglut on my computer running Linux Mint. I follow the steps on this website: http://freeglut.sourceforge.net/docs/install.php. When I do make all in the src directory, it gives the following error:

fatal error: GL/gl.h

This error was given by ../include/GL/freeglut_std.h. Upon inspection, the include/GL directory is indeed devoid of any gl.h file. It is also missing glu.h, which freeglut_std.h also tries to #include. What should I do about this? Why are gl.h and glu.h missing?

Tardy

Did you run make before or after the configure script? configure should have informed you of the missing headers. – Dissever

Answer 1

I'd recommend installing the freeglut3-dev package instead of building from source. That will give you useful stuff like automatic updates and proper pkg-config entries that you can reference in your makefiles.

If you're dead-set on building freeglut from source you'll probably need the libgl1-mesa-dev and (maybe) libglu1-mesa-dev packages.

Dissever

so what are freeglut3-dev and pkg-config? How do I install freeglut3-dev once I've downloaded it? And how does pkg-config assist in installing freeglut? – Tardy

freeglut3-dev is a Debian package name. Mint is Debian/Ubuntu-based. You should be able to install it via sudo apt-get install freeglut3-dev. – Dissever

As the linked Wiki article says: "pkg-config is computer software that provides a unified interface for querying installed libraries for the purpose of compiling software from its source code." – Dissever

pkg-config won't assist in installing freeglut though it will assist in using it. – Dissever

It doesn't seem to be true on Linux Debian. There is no .pc file in freeglut3-dev package for pkg-config. – Serenaserenade

@patryk.beza: Fixed 12 years later! See the glut.pc in libglut-dev. – Dissever

@Dissever reddit.com/r/debian/comments/14a5ul7/… – Serenaserenade

Answer 2

For installing :

1. sudo apt-get install freeglut3 freeglut3-dev libglew-dev
2. sudo apt-get install mesa-utils

For linking :

 g++ .... -lglut -lGL ....

Plated