Why is OpenGL GLX extension not supported by display :?

Question

I am trying to use cygwin to analyze large amounts of data. I've installed all the gl, openGL, freeglut packages, but I keep getting this error message when I run the program that graphs the data input: freeglut (./graph): OpenGL GLX extension not supported by display ':0.0'

Everything else about the program works properly, just the extension seems to not work.

Answer 1

This is tangental to your question, but if for whatever reason Cygwin X isn't supporting GLX you should consider using Xming which does.

Answer 2

GLX is the transport protocol for OpenGL over X11, i.e. using OpenGL in combination with a X11 server. Windows doesn't speak the X11 protocol natively, so Cygwin ships with a X11 server that sits on top of the Windows GDI; but the Cygwin X11 server does not support OpenGL.

Technically it's totally feasible to implement this, i.e. provide a libGL.so that sits on top of %SYSDIR%/opengl32.dll for Direct Rendering and having the Cygwin-Server create OpenGL contexts and all. But nobody did it so far.

So what you must do (unfortunately) is to use the native Windows OpenGL context creation methods.