Developing a simple windowed app for Linux

Question

Okay, I'd like to write a simple C app for Linux (say Ubuntu with Gnome) that would do the following:

1. Open a Window
2. Draw something in that window using a main loop, e.g. the current loop number. I don't want to use controls, but to draw directly on the window surface
3. Close the window & the app

I can do that in Windows, but I've no idea how I could do that in Linux.

Thanks!

Answer 1

Unless you want a full-blown GUI (in which case I'd recommend Qt or GTK), then SDL is a very popular and extremely simple free cross-platform library that gives you a drawing surface and some simple IO facilities. It's natively C, but has bindings to a large number of other languages.