I needed GLUI to do an assignment but I found that it wouldn’t compile on Mac OS X. Here’s what I did to make it work. Hopefully someone will find this with google and it will save them some time. I used GLUI 2.35 and Mac OS X 10.4.8.

Update: My original solution didn’t work on my new Intel-based MacBook Pro, so I’ve updated the instructions below so that they should work for either PowerPC or Intel macs.

Update #2: I got so fed up with this crap that I just made a GLUI Framework which works much nicer with XCode. If you still want it as a libglui.a file, then read on…

First, you have XCode installed, right?

Open the Makefile and change the line:

LIBGL   = -lGLU -lGL

to

LIBGL   = -framework OpenGL

and

LIBGLUT   = -L/usr/X11R6/lib -lglut

to

LIBGLUT   = -L/usr/X11R6/lib -framework GLUT

This assumes you have GLUT.framework installed which you probably do. It should be in /System/Library/Frameworks/. If not, you can download it and install it yourself.

Then build like usual…

pb:~/glui-2.35/src lcyca$ make
mkdir -p bin
mkdir -p lib
g++ -I./ -I./include -I/usr/X11R6/include -c glui_string.cpp
g++ -I./ -I./include -I/usr/X11R6/include -c glui.cpp
...
... (lots of output)

Then you can try out the included examples. Since the mac version of GLUT doesn’t use X11, you can run them straight from Terminal.app.

pb:~/glui-2.35/src lcyca$ cd bin
pb:~/glui-2.35/src/bin lcyca$ ./example5

If you want to actually install it, copy lib/libglui.a to /usr/local/lib/ and include/GL/glui.h to /usr/local/include/GL/, because software that requires it is most likely to be looking for it there.

pb:~/glui-2.35/src lcyca$ mkdir /usr/local/lib
pb:~/glui-2.35/src lcyca$ cp lib/libglui.a /usr/local/lib/
pb:~/glui-2.35/src lcyca$ mkdir /usr/local/include
pb:~/glui-2.35/src lcyca$ cp include/GL/glui.h /usr/local/include/