Using Eclipse for C++ with GLUT on Windows

Published:

January 27, 2008

Reading time:

About 2 min

For my latest grad school class at UNO, cs8626 Computer Graphics (yeah, its an easy elective for this semester), I need to develop some code using OpenGL. In my 10 years as a Java web app developer I haven’t had any need for OpenGL before now, so my knowledge of it is around “beginner” to “sounds like something cool to learn”. I can get by with C/C++/Make and the like, but until now I’ve either used A) Visual Studio back in college, B) a random linux box, or C) Cygwin to do any of my coding. But since I use Eclipse for my Java coding I thought I would tryout the C++ support that it offers on this Windows XP machine.

And, of course, it is next to impossible to navigate and deduce the steps needed to set this all up from the Eclipse website and wiki pages.

Thankfully, after only a few hours and random searches, I found Paul Solt’s GLUT Setup Tutorial with Eclipse CDT on Windows. It goes step by step to get everything installed and running. Note: before finding Paul’s page, I had already gone through Brian Lee’s steps to install MinGW, and I couldn’t get to the Max Berger page that Paul links to; so your results to his step #2 may vary. MinGW is a simple way to install the g++ compiler and its dependencies without using cygwin.

I’m all setup with my first GLUT hello world app for my first assignment now. Hopefully this post will help someone else do the same in the future.