Daily Archives: June 13, 2015

Software development

How to set up SDL2 on Linux

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This article explains how to get started with SDL2 in Linux. For other SDL2 tutorials (including setting up on Windows), check out my SDL2 Tutorials at Programmer’s Ranch.

Using apt-get

If you’re on a Debian-based Linux distribution, you can use the APT package manager to easily install the SDL2 development libraries. From a terminal, install the libsdl2-dev package:

sudo apt-get install libsdl2-dev

Installing from source

If for whatever reason you can’t use a package manager, you’ll have to compile SDL2 from the source code. To do this, you first have to download SDL2:

sdl2linux-download

After extracting the archive to a folder, cd to that folder and run:

./configure

When it’s done, run:

make all

Finally, run:

sudo make install

Testing it out

To verify that you can compile an SDL2 program, use the following code (it’s the same used in my “SDL2: Setting up SDL2 in Visual Studio 2010” article at Programmer’s Ranch):

#include <SDL2/SDL.h>

int main(int argc, char ** argv)
{
    SDL_Init(SDL_INIT_EVERYTHING);
    SDL_Quit();

    return 0;
}

You can use vi or your favourite editor to create the source code:

sdl2linux-minimal

To compile this (assuming it’s called sdl2minimal.c), use the following command:

gcc sdl2minimal.c -lSDL2 -lSDL2main -o sdl2minimal

We need to link in the SDL2 libraries, which is why we add the -lSDL2 -lSDL2main. Be aware that those start with a lowercase L, not a 1. The program should compile. It won’t show you anything if you run it, but now you know that you’re all set up to write SDL2 programs on Linux.

sdl2linux-run