Hi Pete – what’s qt3 ? and qmake? thanks for the info
I’m sure he means the Qt GUI/framework library from trolltech which includes qmake.
Many people can develop using OpenGL on their Linux box without any bells and whistles, so this is definitely a distro/installation/dev environment issue.
> trying to run x86 prog’s doesn’t work 
I’ve tried - but if I compile from source would that theoretically work…?
Maybe you could ask Apple for one of their x86 macs that they’re going to roll out sometime? 
But, yes, you need to recompile the source. Maybe you could ask your lecturers to recompile it under MacOSX on your behalf? Point out to them that you’re easing burden on their limited compute resources, so its in everyone’s best interests! If they compile it for you, then they’d keep their source secret (so you can’t be accused of cheating) but you get it to work under MacOSX and all its affiliated OpenGL goodness.
In theory it shouldn’t be very hard to port it to MacOSX. it maybe not a straight scp and make, but still not very hard. If they sorted out a proper configure script then it’d BE as simple as scp and make. But at a guess, I’d think they wouldn’t have done that. :-/
NB, the fast path to getting an OpenGL context is to use GLUT, not Qt. (Qt would be useful if you’re developing an application with buttons and menu bars and scroll bars and other miscellaneous widgets; GLUT is bare-bones OpenGL context and probably what you want. It’s also easier to set up and use: it doesnt’ require crazy C++ language extensions to work!!)
ok, so let’s see … basically if I just compile source under any os on any hardware I should get it to work? is that supposedly how it goes?
Thanks,
Ben
well, yes. successfully compiling s/w for some architecture will mean it’ll run under the target architecture, pending any miscellaneous run-time issues like missing runtime libraries, insufficient memory, missing graphics card, spontaneous combustion, etc, etc