OpenGL Programming on Linux

Use Linux and get good grades? Read on to learn how Linux helped one student with a major school project.
Conclusion

The project, for all the work-teams in our course, is now finished as far as it involved students working on a programming project whose results professors would evaluate. I finished the final “product” pretty much alone and about a week before all the other teams. In the end, our game client probably had the greatest number of features, the most complex graphics, the nicest explosions and the most reliable motion engine—and we got the highest marks possible on the final evaluation by the professors. Somehow, I think that if I had not been able to run everything on my home Linux machine, and do everything when I wanted it and how I wanted it, I probably would not have reached this level of achievement.

Other than showing that some Computer Engineering students are definitely more productive on their home machines than on most computers you can give them access to, this somewhat extraordinary adventure shows that some fields—which, until now, were reserved for high-end workstations—can be explored with something as simple as a good Linux box and some relevant software.

Future Directions

UPDATE: 11/29/2006

If you want to see the pictures and code relating ot this article go to this link: www.step.polymtl.ca/~coyote/graphics_tank.html

Vincent Cojot is a student in Computer Engineering at the Polytechnical School Of Montréal. He enjoys Computer Graphics, Xview/OL programming (under Linux, of course) and miniatures painting.

______________________

Comments

Comment viewing options

Select your preferred way to display the comments and click "Save settings" to activate your changes.

Linux remote

Anonymous's picture

Any idea how to remote PCs running any type of OS with good quality graphics?

hello, here is a link

ludwin's picture

Hello. I'm learning

Mongolian's picture

Hello. I'm learning OpenGL/SDL. i recommend 4 u NeHe!

Question about Linux/OpenGL

EP's picture

Hey man! I really enjoyed your story. I'm in CETYS Universidad (in Mexico) studying Electronics Engineering. I work developing software in OpenGL using MFC, I want to start programming in C/C++ under Linux and use OpenGL, what links can you recommend me??? I'm totally new to Linux, I installed Fedora 9 a month ago, so I'm not really familiar with the environment, what can I do to learn? any advice will be highly appreciated!

White Paper
Fabric-Based Computing Enables Optimized Hyperscale Data Centers

Today’s modular x86 servers are compute-centric, designed as a least common denominator to support a wide range of IT workloads. Those generic, virtualized IT workloads have much different resource optimization requirements than hyperscale and cloud applications. They have resulted in a “one size fits all” enterprise IT architecture that is not optimized for a specific set of IT workloads, and especially not emerging hyperscale workloads, such as web applications, big data, and object storage. In this report, you will learn how shifting the focus from traditional compute-centric IT architectures to an innovative disaggregated fabric-based architecture can optimize and scale your data center.

Learn More

Sponsored by AMD

White Paper
Red Hat White Paper: Using an Open Source Framework to Catch the Bad Guy

Built-in forensics, incident response, and security with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6

Every security policy provides guidance and requirements for ensuring adequate protection of information and data, as well as high-level technical and administrative security requirements for a system in a given environment. Traditionally, providing security for a system focuses on the confidentiality of the information on it. However, protecting the data integrity and system and data availability is just as important. For example, when processing United States intelligence information, there are three attributes that require protection: confidentiality, integrity, and availability.

Learn more about catching the bad guy in this free white paper.

Learn More

Sponsored by DLT Solutions