newb - where to begin

PLease help me to the front of the line :)

I am somewhat new to OpenGL. I want to work in both the windows and Linux OSs. I know more about C in Windows at this time than I could hope to in Linux :( . ( enviormentally )

I would like to get into 2d and 3d gaming and apps for both the windows and Linux OSs.

For Windows, I have VC++ 6 enterprise, I should be good to go there. I know there are all kinds of tools out there but I need to START somewhere. I do not even know what I need.

Where would I get the most up to date libraries / headers that is "commonly" used?
I see there is 1.1, 1.2, 1. ..... up to 2 ??????

For Linux, what is my best method for working in C++? kwrite is a nice editor. Is there a good method to work code like the ms compiler? or , what are the better practices to follow to set up a Linux enviorment?

I thank you very much in advanced.

[mikael_aronsson]

Hi !

If you don't need to fancy stuff you can use glut or lwgl, this are platform independant libraries that hide all the OS specific stuff for creating windows, mouse input and so on.

If you need more complex user interface stuff you might want to look at one of the platform independant GUI libraries out there, there are many to choose from, Fltk, FOX, Qt4, GTK just to name a few, all of those work on both Windows and Linux but you might want to look into the liceneses, Qt4 for example will only allow you to develop GPL applications and things like that.

If you like KDE then you have a complete IDE for C/C++ development ready to run with pretty much the same functionality as Visual Studio in Linux.

You do not need any extra libraries or headers to develop OpenGL applications, it is all in there, to use extensions you might want to use one of the platform independeant libraries that exists for this, if you search this forum you will find an URL to it (I never manager to rember the name of it, sorry).

Mikael

There's some great tutorials to get you started here:
http://nehe.gamedev.net/

Dan