GLUT is a simple windowing framework for running openGL programs. It is similar to SDL. It is not needed for development but useful because the OpenGL Programming Guide uses GLUT for it's openGL example code. Here is the GLUT main web page.

Installing GLUT

General remarks about installing GLUT.

Linux Install

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get -y install freeglut3 freeglut3-dev libglew1.5 libglew1.5-dev libglu1-mesa libglu1-mesa-dev libgl1-mesa-glx libgl1-mesa-dev mesa-common-dev
It's isn't clear if the ew1 and mesa items are needed. Note that installing freeglut3 but not freeglut3-dev, does not install the GLUT library.

Installing GLUT from source, downloaded from the GLUT web site, based on instructions in various README files that are part of the download, did not work. Repeated Google searches revealed that this is a common problem (the mkmkfiles script fails), but no solution was found that worked on our equipment.

Mac Install

Windows Install

Using GLUT

For using the example code in the OpenGL Programming Guide, simply copy the code examples from the book (the beginning of the book provides a web site to download them from), and build and run them. The same for the example code for CUDA by Example