OpenSG Prerequisites

Prerequisites

What you need to use OpenSG depends mainly on your platform and what you want to do.

Platforms

IRIX

On IRIX you need the 7.3 compilers and GNU make.

Linux

Linux users need a gcc compiler>= 3.2. You need OpenGL support, either XFree>=4 or Mesa.

Windows

Windows is getting a lot simpler now. You need either Visual Studio 7 (.NET) or Visual Studio 6 with the Intel compiler (when using 5, make sure to have the latest version 5.01). Workspaces for the library are in the VSBuild directory, for the tutorials they are part of the binary releases.

Alternatively you can use the Cygwin tools. They are a collection of programs that emulate a Unix environment on the Windows platform, so if you're afraid of command lines, they are not the right tools for you.

If you just want to use OpenSG you can also download a binary release, which comes with precompiled libraries and an example workspace for the tutorial examples, which lets you work inside Visual Studio.

Libraries

OpenSG can compile without any further libraries. It just won't be able to do much without at least some window-system. On Unix it automatically includes support for X-Windows, on MS Windows for Win32 windows, but these are pretty low-level. Higher-level libraries are more useful.

GLUT

Most of the examples and all of the tutorials use GLUT to open windows, thus it is highly recommended to have GLUT installed. All current Linux distributions include it already. If you don't have it, you can get it from OpenGL.org.

Qt

We use the QT toolkit for our higher-level graphical interfaces. There are some examples that use it, the nicest being the osgSceneViewer, but these are non-essential. However, the fcdEdit Tool, which is needed to add new classes to the system, depends on it.
QT is already included in most of the current Linux dustributions. The general library works with any Qt>= 2, the osgSceneViewer however needs the current QT 3.0.

Jpeg

To be able to load JPEG images you need the IJG JPEG library, version 6 or later. This comes with all Linux distributions.

Tiff

To be able to load TIFF images you need the TIFF library, version 3.5 or later. This also comes with all Linux distributions.

Png

To be able to load PNG images you need the PNG library, version 1.0.10 or later. This one also comes with all Linux distributions.

Freetype 1

The experimental text facility needs the FreeType 1 library. It is part of many but not all Linux distributions. Note that the text is not well supported on Windows yet, so you don't need to bother with it here.

Tools

Some parts of the distribution, which are not essential to using the system, need further libraries/tools.

doxygen

The code documentation is created using doxygen. You can also read the documentation on the web, see Documentation for details, so this is not a big problem.
Doxygen is included in most Linux distributions (make sure to have a version>= 1.3.6) We also added a little extension to it, to reduce our internal classes from polluting the Class Hierarchy. If you find hideinhierarchys in your documentation, just ignore them

The Starter Guide Makefile also needs gzip, convert from the Image Magick package to convert tif to eps and fig2dev from the XFig/Transfig package.