OpenGL development on FreeBSD

[Henrik W Lund]

Doug Poland wrote:

>Hello,
>
>I've got a friend that's a C++/OpenGL hacker.  He's got a nifty OpenGL
>app that he wants to port to FreeBSD.  I've no experience with OpenGL
>development on FBSD.  Are there any OpenGL developers out there that
>can point me to FAQs or docs that are necessary to work in this
>environment? 
>
>Many TIA
>
>- 
>Regards,
>Doug
>
Greetings!

Having hacked some OpenGL on FreeBSD myself, I found www.opengl.org to 
be helpful (the obvious one, perhaps), as well as NeHe's tutorials over 
on nehe.gamedev.net

Basically, any stuff that's valid for Linux, is also valid for FreeBSD. 
The OpenGL API is identical (and comes installed with X), the only thing 
that might be different is the placement of libraries and headers, but 
this is handled during compile-time anyways. The other thing is hardware 
acceleration. I'm fuzzy on this, but my impression is that this is 
somewhat non-existent on FreeBSD. The only exception quite possibly 
being the NVIDIA drivers.

If he's porting from Linux, my guess is that he's got a fairly easy job 
ahead of him. If he's porting from Windows, that's going to pose a lot 
more work. Also, he'll need to use one of the appropriate libraries 
(GLUT or SDL) unless he wants to code directly atop libX11 *shudder*.

Hope this helps!
-Henrik