NixOS, Haskell, opengl : problems with building and running openGL programs

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I'm experiencing a problem with GL on NixOS: the problem seems to be old, but there is still no straightforward solution yet in 2017!

I'm trying to build a Haskell program using the Gloss library. I have installed gloss and everything it needs using the nix-shell -p mesa and it seems to be properly build and istalled (using cabal install). However if I build the program in the same nix-shell it doesn't work:

$ nix-shell -p mesa_glu

[nix-shell:]$ ghc --make -O2 SnakePar.hs
Linking SnakePar ...

[nix-shell:]$ ./SnakePar 
SnakePar: user error (unknown GLUT entry glutInit)

While working outside of a nix-shell the linking stage failes:

$ ghc --make -O2 SnakePar.hs
[1 of 1] Compiling Main             ( SnakePar.hs, SnakePar.o )
Linking SnakePar ...
/nix/store/<hash>-binutils-2.27/bin/ld: cannot find -lGLU
/nix/store/<hash>-binutils-2.27/bin/ld: cannot find -lGL
collect2: error: ld returned 1 exit status
`cc' failed in phase `Linker'. (Exit code: 1)

This happens even though I have manually installed the glu library via nix-env -iA.

$ nix-env -q
cabal-install-1.24.0.0
ghc-8.0.1
glu-9.0.0

I have tried using freeglut or mesa in the same manner, but none of these (or even all together) didn't work.

What am I missing?

This question is relevant but it doesn't help: nixos + haskell + opengl (prerequisites)

Solution: After switching to stack everything works.

2

There are 2 answers

7
Soham Chowdhury On BEST ANSWER

I just fixed this, after three days of, well, being another not-happy Arch-user-until-last-week: try adding freeglut to the nix-shell environment, i.e. use nix-shell -p mesa freeglut.

For stack users stumbling upon this answer, add this to ~/.stack/stack.yaml:

nix:
  enable: true
  packages: [mesa freeglut]

The nix-shell solution doesn't work in this case -- the problem, as I'm guessing, is that Stack always works inside a pure environment even if run from inside a nix-shell. I did try pure: false in the nix section of stack.yaml, but that didn't work. This does, for now.

  • mesa is required to provide the C headers for OpenGLRaw and other libraries (and this is why linking fails in your case, I believe).
  • freeglut provides the GLUT bindings (you'll get the "unknown GLUT entry" error otherwise) required at runtime.

You may need to change the mesa there to something else, like mesa_glu.

1
NCrashed On

The following helped me:

with import <nixpkgs> {};
pkgs.stdenv.mkDerivation rec {
  name = "dev-env";
  buildInputs = with pkgs; [
    mesa
    freeglut
  ];
  LD_LIBRARY_PATH = with pkgs; "${freeglut}/lib";
}

Copy this to shell.nix, enter the environment with nix-shell and run compiled executable inside the env.