SDL stands for Simple DirectMedia Layer and it’s an open source multimedia library written in C and designed to provide low level access to mouse, keyboard, audio, joystick, 3D graphics hardware via Direct3D and OpenGL.<\/p>\n
These days, SDL is heavily used by emulators, video playback software, as well as numerous popular games, including the award winning Linux port of “Civilization: Call To Powe,” many Humble Bundle games, and Valve’s award winning catalog.<\/p>\n
Simple DirectMedia Layer runs on numerous operating systems, including the mainstream GNU\/Linux, Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X ones. The BeOS, BSD (FreeBSD, OpenBSD), BSD\/OS, Solaris, IRIX, QNX OSes, as well as the Android and iOS mobile operating systems are also supported. Supported hardware platforms include 32 and 64-bit.<\/p>\n
SDL is usually available for download on numerous Linux kernel-based operating systems, through their official software repositories. Installing it using the latest source package, which is distributed for free on Softpedia, is easy as pie.<\/p>\n
Download and save the archive on your Home directory, unpack it, open a Terminal app and navigate to the location where you\u2019ve extracted the archive file (e.g. cd \/home\/softpedia\/SDL2-2.0.3).<\/p>\n
Run the \u2018.\/configure && make\u2019 command to configure, optimize and compile the program. After a successful compilation, run the \u2018sudo make install\u2019 command as a privileged user to install SDL system wide.<\/p>\n
A quick look under the hood of the SDL project, will inform us that it is written in the C programming language and that it works natively with C++. Bindings for other programming languages are also available, supporting the popular Python, Ada, Java, Lua, Eiffel, ML, PHP, Perl, Pike, Ruby, and C#.<\/p>\n