The most popular free openGL implementation seems to
be the Mesa-3D graphics library (http://mesa3d.org). The web-page has
detailed instructions on installation and downloading. I
did the following:
- Download the files MesaLib-6.2.1.tar.bz2 &
MesaDemos-6.2.1.tar.bz2 (6.2.1 is the latest version at this time).
- Extract both using the command "tar xvfj". This will create a
directory "Mesa-6.2.1" with all the source and demo programs.
- CD to this directory and configure for Linux "make linux-x86"
- Type "make" to build everything.
- After compilation is complete, set the dynamic library path
(preferrably in your .bash_profile) to point to the Mesa installation. In my
case, "export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$LD_LIBRARY_PATH:$HOME/MesaLib-6.2.1/lib".
- Run a sample program from the "progs/demos" directory. If it runs
successfully, install is complete. To compile openGL code, the Mesa directories
have to be added as compiler flags. For your example program "hello.cpp",
compiler command is "gcc -I $HOME/Mesa-6.2.1/include/GL -L $HOME/Mesa-6.2.1/lib
-lglut hello.cpp -o hello".