These instructions (by Larry Reznick) do not cover exactly everything that is covered by the other platform chapters, so you may wish to read through some other chapter as well.
Linux does not currently have a "preferred" IDE, so you may need to improvise a bit when the tutorial speaks about IDE tasks.
(If your distribution doesn't use RPMs, you may wish to try the same tasks with your distribution's package management system).
There may be an SDL library present on your Linux system in /usr/lib
and header files in /usr/include/SDL. Chances are they're older than the
latest stable release. You can check your SDL installation with "rpm -q
SDL" or all possible variations with "rpm -qa | grep SDL". You may want
to use rpm to remove this. I didn't need to.
Download the latest SDL tarfile. (I always install from source
tarfiles, not RPMs.)
Change to the directory in which you want to extract the SDL source
subdirectory.
Extract the data using tar, such as with "tar -xvzf SDL-1.2.8.tar.gz".
Change to the subdirectory just created for the SDL source.
Check the configure options using "./configure --help" and note any
options relevant to your needs.
Run "configure" with any options needed.
Run "make" to build the software.
Switch to the root user and run "make install".
If /etc/ld.so.conf doesn't have "/usr/local/lib" in it, and no files
exist in /etc/ld.so.conf.d, either add that "/usr/local/lib" line to the
file, or write a /etc/ld.so.conf.d/local.conf file containing that
"/usr/local/lib" line.
Run "ldconfig".
Enjoy SDL.
The tutorial assumes that you're using some kind of IDE, and that every chapter's project
is in its own directory (starting from folder called ch01), and that there's a main source
file called main.cpp.