Hello everyones!

I manage to have my PC running Linux SUSE 9.2 and get rid of the windoze os. I can compile and run an hello world program in a shell.. but now I want to move to the next level... by trying the Hello World sample from the OpenGL red book.

The problem it's that I don't have any GLUT/OpenGL includes files in my machine! I took a look in /usr/include/GL and I got only gle.h.. no glut.h file! In fact, I output all files on my HD and I search for anything with glut.. I found only dynamic library (.so) which can be used by the program once it's compiled.

I also check on the sourceforge web site... but that seem an older version than the one I have on my system...!? And, after trying.. I got several errors trying to do the make operations. And I figure that maybe it's not the proper way of installing it on SUSE distribution.

best regards,
impress

Okay, I manage to found the solution!

So, for people who install Linux SUSE like me and wonder why they don't have any include or library files installed.. In fact, you need extra packages which are not on the DVD (at least with SUSE 9.2).

However, those packages are availables on Linux SUSE FTP site.

I needed to install the following packages (available under /i586, I am using 32-bit SUSE 9.2 for i386):

freeglut-devel*.rpm
fontconfig-devel-*.rpm
xorg-x11-devel*.rpm
xorg-x11-Mesa-devel*.rpm

Now, I get a window open with some OpenGL inside it!

my next question.. now that I can do some OpenGL stuff, I am looking for a function to retrieve time with a precision of at least 1ms... I try clock() from time.h.. but even if it claim that the precision seem to be micro-seconds... when I use the value in my program, the animation is not smooth at all.. which make me think that it return huge number but lot's of zero...

for Sound, which library should I use? I heard about OSS and ALSA? Seem like ALSA is better than OSS but maybe there's one very standard on Linux.

regards,
impress

ALSA has replced OSS - and provides an OSS interface for compatability. So, ALSA will work for more up-to-date ditrsos, and OSS should work on all of them. I would go with ALSA, I doubt many poeple will use OSS soon.

D

In the meanwhile,you may want to switch to SDL and leave the world of GLUT.

SDL will make your job a lot simpler.You can check out this link for more information.

Thanks DS2K3 & Hemant...

I have installed SDL and start working around it. Also, during the weekend, I have install hardware acceleration for my ATI graphic card. I see that glxgears is now running at 1000 FPS.. for my ASUS 9200SE which I bought a month ago to upgrade from a TNT. I am surprise that it's not running more than 1000FPS. But it's faster than before when I was around 500FPS.

I did a small program using SDL and OpenGL to display a square which rotate on itself.. in fact it's the first animation proposed in the red book of OpenGL. I try it in 1280x1024 full screen and it's seem very poor frame rate just to display a white square on black screen. So, it make me wonder what kind of Real-Time 3D performance I would achieve!? I try using some flags in SDL to specify using Hardware acceleration.. like the one for surface renderer. But it's seem to be about the same performance.

Maybe, I should consider a nVidia video card for my next PC...?

Great! I found something to compile and test 3D on my PC.. I were looking for benchmark like 3DMark.. or anythings which look more serious than glxgear. I found a demo on pouet.net called VIP2. In fact, they provide source code and you need to compile it yourself... I compile it using "make" but I needed to add #include AFM_H (or something similar) in IncludesglWindow.h of that project. Then, I am able to launch that demo on my Linux machine in 1280x1024 and get fluid movements! Now, I am happy to see that my PC can at least show up something acceptable! There's glitches between part.. but I wrote to the one who was doing porting of that demo from Windows to Linux and he mentions me that due to limitation of 64megs of RAM, a lot's of things are loaded on small portion of time which could end up of small break of <500ms that I saw on my PC.

Maybe, launching a 3D game would have do it.. but, I having something you can compile and let play without any interaction sound better as a test... Some scene show lot's of objects in movement.

so, if you are looking for 3D Benchmarking on Linux.. you might want to give a try to...
http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=8562

regards,
impress