ok as of yet I have exclusively used glut to do opengl…
but I wish to learn windowing systems because I know that glut has its limitations. My question is what do people use (in general and for opengl)… I would like to hear suggestions for all operating systems and maybe some places where I could get some info… books?
Thank you all very much
I love you guys 
I use a set of game programming libraries called SDL. You can find out all about 'em at http://www.devolution.com/~slouken/SDL/index.html It has just about all the components you’ll need to make a win32 / linux game: keyboard, mouse, joystick, audio, video, etc. libraries. I like it mostly because it helps me avoid Win32 code, which I despise.
If you want to read some good OpenGL books, just go to the links I posted in the post below, “What do I need for programming OpenGL?” Hope all that helps.