freeglut Internal error

freeglut (): ERROR: Internal error <Visual with necessary capabilities not found> in function fgOpenWindow

Ran into this error while trying some opengl examples from the redbook. There are some obvious reasons for this error - like absence of 3D graphics card or driver support absent for glx. But that wasn't my case.

I could solve the problem just by replacing

glutInitDisplayMode (GLUT_SINGLE | GLUT_INDEX);

to

glutInitDisplayMode (GLUT_SINGLE | GLUT_RGBA);

Reference thread that helped.