GLUT

Most of our examples will use GLUT as the utility library.

GLUT is a higher level interface built on top of GL, and adds things like:

mouse/keyboard input.

This requires callback functions to be called from an event loop.
higher level geometric objects like spheres, cubes and teapots.

The original GLUT implementation is proprietary, but open source implementations exist such as Freeglut.

It is basically a super simple game engine.

GLUT wraps system specific code into an uniform API.

All functions are prefixed with glut.

Freeglut

Open source implementation of GLUT.

Often used together with the Mesa implementation of GL.

Installation Ubuntu on 12.04:

sudo aptitude install freeglut3-dev