Talk:OpenGL Programming/Installation/Windows

I tried building glut from source and was unable to do so with MinGW at the time. Maybe it's more portable now. I found out about freeglut and it built easily from source with MinGW. I'd recommend it over glut when working on Windows especially if you want to build everything from source. I use freeglut if I need glut on other platforms as well.

If you install MinGW (and I work mainly with the original MinGW from mingw.org), it installs with gl.h, glext.h and glu.h in the include/gl subdirectory. It also installs libopengl32.a, libglu32.a (glut library) and libglaux.a. These library files (with .a extension) are stubs to allow easy linking to opengl related dlls already on the Windows system. The w32api package of MinGW generates the library files in a format MinGW can work with and includes the headers.