I have been playing with some opengl examples from the graphics bible Computer graphics Principles and Practice. The first step is getting hello world to work.

Hello World Link to heading

This example shows polygon by defining 4 points.

#include <GL/glut.h>

void displayMe(void)
{
    glClear(GL_COLOR_BUFFER_BIT);
    glBegin(GL_POLYGON);
    glVertex3f(0.0, 0.0, 0.0);
    glVertex3f(0.5, 0.0, 0.0);
    glVertex3f(0.5, 0.5, 0.0);
    glVertex3f(0.0, 0.5, 0.0);
    glEnd();
    glFlush();
}

int main(int argc, char **argv)
{
    glutInit(&argc, argv);
    glutInitDisplayMode(GLUT_SINGLE);

    glutInitWindowSize(300, 300);
    glutInitWindowPosition(100, 100);
    glutCreateWindow("Hello world");

    glutDisplayFunc(displayMe);

    glutMainLoop();
    return 0;
}

The generated graphics would be

Example image

To compile opengl application, libGL and libglut are linked. libraries are installed by installing libopengl-dev and freeglut3

g++ main.cpp -lglut -lGL