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CS488/688: Introduction to Computer Graphics

Working from home

You are welcome to work on the assignments outside the undergrad graphics lab (you might prefer to do so given the limited number of machines there). Remember, though, that it is your responsibility to make sure the code you submit compiles and runs properly on the lab's Linux boxes. We mark your assignment by running your program. If it doesn't run, you'll get a very low mark.

What follows are some general tips about setting up the course's computing environment on your home machine. The course staff might try to help you, but they reserve the right to attend to matters more central to the course. If you're stuck, you can try posting questions to the course newsgroup: uw.cs.cs488. Other students or staff may be able to help you solve your problems.

What you'll need

We made an effort to choose tools that were widely available, free (in both senses), cross-platform, and well documented. The course depends upon the following applications and libraries:

You will need gtkglextmm and all of its dependencies.
Lua 5.0.2. Lua is a scripting language that we'll use to define 3D pupeets and scenes in assignments 3 and 4.

Of course, you'll also need an OpenGL implementation. On a modern (fast) computer, you can probably do most of the work for this course without hardware acceleration, in which case you can use the Mesa library (under Linux). Most new computers will have accelerated 3D graphics.

Linux

Ubuntu Hardy

sudo apt-get install libgtkglextmm-x11-dev

Ubuntu Gutsy (or Fiesty)

This is the tricky one. It seems that libgtkglextmm1-dev was removed from Gutsy's repository. If you cannot get the packages using apt-get, you need to install the packages for Dapper manually using dpkg. Download libgtkglextmm1c2a.deb and libgtkextmm1-dev.deb. Then run:

sudo dpkg -i libgtkglextmm1c2a_1.0.1-3ubuntu3_xxx.deb
sudo dpkg -i libgtkglextmm1-dev_1.0.1-3ubuntu3_xxx.deb

Ubuntu Dapper

sudo apt-get install libgtkglextmm1

Other Distros

Current Linux distributions will have almost everything you need built in. If your distro doesn't have the right libraries in binary format, building them from source should be straightforward.

Windows

The easiest way to get all these libraries installed is by downloading Cygwin, a popular UNIX-like toolkit for Windows. Once Cygwin is installed, you should be able to selectively enable the necessary packages in a manner very similar to a Linux distribution.

It may also be possible to use Microsoft's development tools for this course. Note that the barebones compiler tools are freely available from Microsoft. Alternatively, the full versions are available for a very low price from the CHIP office in the math building.

Mac OS X

If you have Tiger, then follow Anton Zolotkov's instructions.

If you have Leopard, then do the following steps:

Install XQuartz.
Install Fink. Make sure you have the latest updates if you have an older version (run fink self-update).
Enable unstable packages in Fink.
fink install gtkglextmm gtkglextmm-shlibs
You need the old lua (NOT 5.1) in Fink to run A3.

Plan 9

Sorry, the course software is not available for Plan 9.

Maintainer: cs488@cgl.uwaterloo.ca
Revision 1.4 by cs488 on 2008/08/25 14:43:50 (UTC).