Sounds like GLUT is asking for a visual which your card doesn’t support. Are you using the TNT2 card you mentioned in your previous post? TNT2’s are getting pretty old now.
Check the output of the ‘glxinfo’ command, which will list the frame-buffer configurations your card will support. Compare with the arguments to glutCreateWindow, which describe what buffer the program is asking for.
The tutorials use
glutInitDisplayMode(JUNK | GLUT_ALPHA),
or something like that. To get it working, I had to take out the alpha option, as it mentions in the site.