Simple DirectMedia Layer

Simple DirectMedia Layer (SDL) is a cross-platform, free and open source software multimedia library written in C that presents a simple interface to various platforms' graphics, sound, and input devices. It is used by developers to write computer games or other multimedia applications that can run on many operating systems including Linux, the PSP, Syllable, Haiku/BeOS, OpenVMS, Windows, Mac OS X, AmigaOS 4 and its clone MorphOS. It manages video, events, digital audio, CD-ROM, sound, threads, shared object loading, networking and timers.

Setting up and getting started with Simple DirectMedia Layer tutorials
There are already good tutorials about SDL on the web, and here is a few of them:


 * Beginning Game Programming, a great tutorial by Lazy Foo' Productions


 * SDL:Tutorials on Game Programming Wiki

SDL's homepage also lists a bunch of SDL tutorials. For setting up SDL, Lesson 1 in the tutorial by Lazy Foo' Productions is warmly recomended.