JOGL Installation

Step 1

Install the Java runtime (or JDK if you are a developer) 1.4.2_01 or later. For example, the Win32 default directory of for the JRE is:

Note that there is a hard requirement for a minimum of 1.4.2_01. Anything earlier than this is not acceptable and JOGL is likely to crash your machine.

Step 2

This currently requires manually downloading the latest betas of JOGL and installing it to the same directory. JOGL does not have a nice pretty installer currently, so you're left with just a collection of JAR files that you have to extract and place in the right locations.

So, first you need to head over here to download a copy of JOGL. First click on the little plus sign for the area that you want (eg Release Builds 2006). Next, click on the link for the particular version you want. Do not click on the little plus sign. You'll get nothing. Now that you have the list of files available for that build and you will need to download two files. First, download the jogl.jar file and then the appropriate foo-natives JAR file for the platform that you want to run on.

Go to the directory that you earlier installed the JDK/JRE into. Extract the jogl.jar file into the lib/ext directory underneath the main installation directory. For example, if you installed the JRE to

C:\Program Files\JavaSoft\Jre\1.4.2_01\

Then you will need to place the contents of jogl.jar into:

C:\Program Files\JavaSoft\Jre\1.4.2_01\lib\ext

Next go to the appropriate natives JAR file that you downloaded and extract it to the bin directory in the same area. eg:

C:\Program Files\JavaSoft\Jre\1.4.2_01\bin

You should now be ready to run any JOGL-based demos.

As a word of caution: Although these instructions suggest installing into the JRE directly, frequently this is an unwise thing to do if you are going to be using other 3rd-party applications. For example, Java WebStart will have conflicts with this installed version, as well as any applications that come with their own installed version (or in our case if you want to use our ported version for SWT). We recommend that you install JOGL into a separate directory and modify your system CLASSPATH and LD_LIBRARY_PATH/PATH to point to the appropriate directory. This should avoid any future issues of crashing or incompatible libraries within other applications.