[Plib-users] RH9/glut/nvidia incompatibility

[Andy R. <an...@pl...>]

[Oops, I said I'd cc plib but didn't.  Here it is.  Followups
 should probably go to fli...@fl... to reach
 the original bug reporter.]

Mike Urig wrote:
> I upgraded to RH9 the other day and when I tried to run FG it did
> nothing. So I'm in the process of recompiling it but when I went to
> "./configure" plib I got the message: configure: error: could not find
> working GLUT library.

You probably installed the NVidia drivers, right?  Red Hat 9 ships a
broken GLUT that won't work with third party libGL's.

What happened is that they ship GLUT as distributed by SGI, not the
one in the Mesa distribution.  The SGI glut hasn't changed since 1998,
and therefore doesn't know how to link dynamically against extensions
using glXGetProcAddressARB().  So it tries to link against the
SGIX_video_resize extension statically instead.  Until recently,
XFree/DRI/Mesa didn't support this extension, so the support wasn't
compiled in.  But now they do, so the resulting GLUT depends on these
functions.  But guess what?  NVidia (and other third party OpenGL
implementations) don't support it.  So glut programs can't link.

The Mesa version has this fixed, so what you need to do is remove the
glut from Red Hat ("rpm -e glut glut-devel") and install the one from
Mesa.  Another option is, after installing the NVidia drivers, to
rebuilt the glut srpm.  The NVidia headers don't export that
extension.

I tried reporting this to Red Hat's bugzilla, but somehow wires got
crossed and Mike Harris kinda threw a temper tantrum and locked the
bug so the outside world can't see it.  If you want to re-report it
there, please be very gentle. :)

There's also a thread at the NVidia discussion site where I re-posted
the summary:

  http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?s=&postid=103801#post103801

We should probably add this to the website as a FAQ.  It's going to
bite lots of people.  I'm CC'ing the plib folks, because it affects
them too.

Andy

-- 
Andrew J. Ross        Beyond the Ordinary        Plausibility Productions
Sole Proprietor       Beneath the Infinite       Hillsboro, OR
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