Getting a hold of the back buffer

Hey-o. I just started looking at GL today after playing with Direct X in Windows for a bit before moving to Linux.

Any road up… in Direct X I can get a handle to the back buffer and write colour information directly to the pixels; i.e. the buffer would just be a huge byte array and I can access it in threes for RGB.

Can I do the same in OpenGL? It would be handy for me right now, seeing as I just started and am exploring.

Sorta, look into glDrawPixels() (and glReadPixels() for reading).

It allows you to write to a certain part of the framebuffer. However it is pretty slow.