Hi, the SDL libraries currently shipped in the Maemo 5 SDK and device come without OpenGL support. This is a problem for games like Frets on Fire:

http://jyro.blogspot.com/2009/03/fre...fremantle.html
http://jyro.blogspot.com/2009/03/fof...-for-n810.html

Now there is a package with the SDL libraries recompiled with --enable-video-opengl. See https://bugs.maemo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4177

We are looking for testers in order to make sure that the new package would actually work without affecting performance or stability for non-OpenGL, plain SDL games.

It seems that people are misguided here.

OpenGL != OpenGLES.

The device doesn't support OpenGL, it does support OpenGLES. This is a subset of OpenGL.

OpenGL applications work in the SDK because these applications use the PC hardware(host), which has OpenGL. A compiled binary will not work on the device.

OpenGL applications will not run on the device without rewriting the OpenGL specific parts to OpenGLES.

And then there is a big difference between OpenGL and OpenGLES v2, which is what device supports.

More info:
http://wiki.maemo.org/OpenGL-ES

I'd like to also point the fact that Firebird was porting SDL 1.3 to Fremantle, which has native OpenGL ES support (as used on Pandora), and also can peacefully coexist with libSDL 1.2 on device (they have different package name and soname).

In fact, he already uploaded a test version to -devel. If you have a SDL 1.3 compatible app you're encouraged to try, since, well, we don't have a device (hopefully, "yet" ).

Of course, this does not help FoF. <technical>But this SDL build does not either, since on device it's basically going to crash with "Failed loading libGL.so.1" or fallback silently to XShm (as used in previous SDL build) if the SDL_OPENGL flag is not passed. Thus, basically, we've enlarged the binary for no reason </technical>. Unless of course there have been extra changes in this build that I don't know of.

Heh, sorry I didn't make announcement of any sort, hadn't really tested if it worked or not since it goes "No OpenGLES" in my scratchbox, feel free to write some SDL1.3+GLES apps though as Javispedro has said .

Edit:
Needs some work to make it use OpenGLES 2.0, 1.1 only at the moment.

This reminds me that SDK only has GLES 2 "emulation" packages as Kate said. For OGL ES 1.1 you still need to get Imagination SDK (way more difficult to install than apt-get, but still within a mere mortal's reach ).

When was this added and what are the packages called? I checked when the final SDK came out and it did not have the OpenGL ES2 emulation yet.

@TedMilker

You need to install Nokia closed binary:http://tablets-dev.nokia.com/eula/index.php

And try to find sgx package via apt-cache search sgx.
Somehow it's hard to notice and many people would miss it.

the x86 emulation libs come in libgles2-dev package in extras-devel.

I tried to summarize the discussion here in my blog: http://www.rojtberg.net/312/opengl-on-the-n900/

in case someone non-technical wants to understand the issue...

Ncie post, but I'd like to point a few corrections:
- The N900 supports both OGLES 1.1 and 2.0 .
- SDL 1.3 is already available in N900, only untested.
- Note that EGL alone does not replace Glut, you still need to create windows.

And things to consider:
- It would be trivial to modify sdl 1.2 to use egles contexts (already done by some iPhone guys). However, I see this as an oportunity for a community maintained SDL 1.3 to flourish without breaking any of the Nokia games.