Question

I’m running the Eclipse IDE on Ubuntu 12.04 with the Valgrind plugin. I’ve been working on a game in C++ for quite some time, and I seem to have a memory error somewhere. Normally, I trace these with Valgrind. However, glut fails to initialize when I run valgrind. I should note that the game initializes without a problem when I’m not using valgrind. The code for my main function is as follows:

int main(int argc, char** argv) {
  char windowTitle[12] = "Game Window";
  printf("Initializing Glut...\n");
  glutInit(&argc, argv);
  printf("Glut initialized!\n");
  alutInit(&argc, argv);
  Game_Object* game = new Game_Object(windowTitle, 1200, 675, argc, argv);
  delete game;
  printf("game ended\n");
  return 0;
}

The resulting output to the console is:

Initializing Glut
freeglut (/home/dsnettleton/Documents/Programming/Eclipse/workspace/Plutoids/Debug/Plutoids): failed to open display ''

Obviously, the program isn’t getting very far with valgrind running.
It’s really disheartening to be in such a final stage of my development, only to get stuck trying to weed out a memory error. What might be keeping glut from initializing, and what can I do to fix the problem?

Answer 1

This is my guess: your IDE is probably missing the $DISPLAY environment variable. Somewhere you have to configure the environment to set $DISPLAY before launching Valgrind.

Launch a terminal and echo $DISPLAY. Its value is probably :0.0.

In the worst case, I’d try using setenv() inside the C code or set DISPLAY in the command line that launches Valgrind (none of these cases was tested, they may not work).