Running Linux, 5th Edition

Multimedia Toolkits and Development Environments

KDE and GNOME have already been discussed. They provide basic support for graphics and sound that can be used for multimedia applications if they are not too demanding. If you want to do more, or if KDE or GNOME does not fit your needs, there are other toolkits available that are worth considering. This section briefly mentions some of the more popular multimedia toolkits and libraries available for Linux.

Simple DirectMedia Layer (SDL )

Simple DirectMedia Layer (SDL) is a cross-platform multimedia library designed to provide low-level access to audio, keyboard, mouse, joystick, 3D hardware via OpenGL , and 2D video framebuffers. It is used by MPEG playback software, emulators, and many popular games, including the award-winning Linux port of Civilization: Call to Power.

SDL is written in C, but works with C++ natively and has bindings to several other languages, including Ada, Eiffel, Java, Lua, ML, Perl, PHP, Pike, Python, and Ruby.

The project home page is http://www.libsdl.org.

OpenGL

OpenGL is a standardized API for 2D and 3D graphics programming developed by Silicon Graphics, Inc. (SGI). It supports rendering, texture mapping, special effects, and other powerful visualization functions. More information can be found at http://www.opengl.org.

There are several free implementations of OpenGL support under Linux. The most popular is Mesa. Because it is not licensed from SGI, it cannot officially be called OpenGL, but it is designed to ...