what's glx?

My professor told me I can use glx? what’s glx in windows environment?
My professor use Linux, so maybe it is something else in Windows environment.

As far as I know it’s only for the X GUI for Linux (and Unix?) systems. Someone else could probably help more, as I have yet to try and OpenGL programming under Linux.

glX is the client/server network protocol that *nix systems use for OpenGL communications in X environments.

Each system has a set of window system bindings. This is the API that glues OpenGL to the system’s windowing system. On Windows this is WGL (pronounced “wiggle”). On X-Windows it’s GLX. I’m not sure what it’s called on MacOS.

If you’re on Windows, you will use WGL. GLX means nothing to you.

MacOS uses AGL ( apple gl i suppose)

Yup, on Windows the equivalent is WGL. You may want to run this info by your professor. He may have stipulated GLX to make sure you handle your own context creation and event handling instead of relying on a library like GLUT to do it for you. GLUT helps for learning OpenGL but you miss out on some of the basics if that is all you’ve ever done.

On the other hand he may have other intentions like actually learning GLX, so check, WGL is not GLX it merely fills a similar role on that platform.

You can still use GLX on windows if you use Mesa for your openGL rendering, it will operate in software but it has software wrappers for GLX calls that will work AFAIK (It’s been a while so check this for yourself). The GLX emulation will only be an API clone and won’t actually act like GLX under the covers with the cliend/server remote rendering & direct rendering support etc. On the right platform (like Linux) Mesa will support this if configured correctly.

I wouldn’t recommend Mesa on Windows though, because you’re not really programming the hardware and you miss some of the excitement of seeing your stuff run in hardware for the first time and some of the newer extensions on interesting hardware (last I checked).

[This message has been edited by dorbie (edited 12-01-2003).]