OpenGL GLX error when using libfreenect with Kinect

Question

I am trying to set up libfreenect to work with the Pi, to be able to capture images from the Kinect. There are a lot of discussions all around the web on this topic, but as far as I can tell no-one has reported a success story.

I have been attempting to solve the problem via the libfreenect route, and have managed to install the library on the Pi. When running the test program glview, however, the following error occurs:

freeglut (/usr/local/bin/glview): OpenGL GLX extension not supported by display ':0.0'

Searching around the internet, it appears some other people have had the same problems on Ubuntu. This blog is running Ubuntu on BeagleBoard, and gets the same problem; they report:

I hit the error:

Xlib: extension "GLX" missing on display ":0"

This seems to be a freeglut problem - OpenGL GLX extension not supported by display ":0"

I removed Nvidia drivers (I think this involved apt-get remove nvidia-common or some such, but this is the one step I forgot to document).

Can I follow a similar route on the Pi? If not, what other avenues are open to me to fix this problem?

Answer 1

Unfortunately the Raspberry Pi doesn't actually support OpenGL. It supports OpenGLES instead. The perfect solution would be to port the applications you want to run from the former to the latter. This is unrealistic in most cases though so there are some ways around it. The first would be to get mesa installed and pure software OpenGL up and running. This will be very slow (e.g. impossible to use for games). The second approach is to use an OpenGL to OpenGLES library that catches the OpenGL function calls and translates them to equivalent OpenGLES calls that the Pi can interpret. There are at least two projects that do this, but I don't know if either of them actually supports the Pi yet. And stupidly I can't find the links to them. I'm really annoyed about that. This may be of some help though.

• Jacksonkr: Oh man, the links! We need them.