A Crash Course in SDL Linux gaming is exploding, partly because
of the simple fact that geeks like games, and partly because of
recent developments in Linux multimedia. Over the past few years
a number of excellent Linux-oriented multimedia toolkits have
emerged, such as the GGI graphics interface and the ALSA sound
system. The SDL library has also made a bit of a splash
recently. SDL is a general-purpose, multimedia-programming
library that provides fast and portable access to graphics,
sound, input devices, threads and OpenGL rendering. The core SDL
library is portable to several flavors of UNIX as well as BeOS,
MacOS and Win32. This makes it an excellent choice for
developing cross-platform games without compromising
performance. Unlike many multimedia toolkits, SDL does not
actually talk to the system's hardware. Instead, it serves as a
layer between an application and the underlying system. For
instance, SDL's graphics system might use the frame buffer
console or X11 under Linux, but DirectDraw under Win