(this is an updated cut-and-paste of an email I send on occasion, as SDL
and Ubuntu march forward. Something similar to this might work for your
non-Ubuntu distro, though.)
Package dependencies have changed slightly from before. Notably: we have
Wayland and Mir support now. 
If you have a Ubuntu 14.04 system and want to build an SDL2 with
everything (but still only link against glibc…it’ll dynamically load
dependencies at runtime and make decisions based on what’s available on
the end-user’s system), here are the magic command lines.
I’m posting this since I have to figure this out every time I reinstall
Ubuntu.
Get all the dependencies…
sudo apt-get install build-essential mercurial make cmake autoconf
automake libtool libasound2-dev libpulse-dev libaudio-dev libx11-dev
libxext-dev libxrandr-dev libxcursor-dev libxi-dev libxinerama-dev
libxxf86vm-dev libxss-dev libgl1-mesa-dev libesd0-dev libdbus-1-dev
libudev-dev libgles1-mesa-dev libgles2-mesa-dev libegl1-mesa-dev
libwayland-dev libmirclient-dev
Do a clone of the repo with Mercurial…
hg clone http://hg.libsdl.org/SDL
build it.
cd SDL
mkdir buildbot
cd buildbot
…/configure
make
sudo make install
test it!
cd SDL/test
mkdir buildbot
cd buildbot
…/configure
make
./testsprite2 # or one of many other fine test apps.
NOTES:
- This includes all the audio targets except arts, because Ubuntu pulled
the artsc0-dev package, but in theory SDL still supports it.
- DirectFB isn’t included because the configure script (currently) fails
to find it at all. You can do “sudo apt-get install libdirectfb-dev” and
fix the configure script to include DirectFB support. Send patches.
- Both of these prior notes were true for Ubuntu 11.04 too. Maybe it’s
time to drop these targets. 
–ryan.
FWIW, the previous version of these instructions is preserved in
README-linux.txt
2014-05-24 2:55 GMT-03:00 Ryan C. Gordon :> (this is an updated cut-and-paste of an email I send on occasion, as SDL
and Ubuntu march forward. Something similar to this might work for your
non-Ubuntu distro, though.)
Package dependencies have changed slightly from before. Notably: we have
Wayland and Mir support now.
If you have a Ubuntu 14.04 system and want to build an SDL2 with
everything (but still only link against glibc…it’ll dynamically load
dependencies at runtime and make decisions based on what’s available on the
end-user’s system), here are the magic command lines.
I’m posting this since I have to figure this out every time I reinstall
Ubuntu.
Get all the dependencies…
sudo apt-get install build-essential mercurial make cmake autoconf
automake libtool libasound2-dev libpulse-dev libaudio-dev libx11-dev
libxext-dev libxrandr-dev libxcursor-dev libxi-dev libxinerama-dev
libxxf86vm-dev libxss-dev libgl1-mesa-dev libesd0-dev libdbus-1-dev
libudev-dev libgles1-mesa-dev libgles2-mesa-dev libegl1-mesa-dev
libwayland-dev libmirclient-dev
Do a clone of the repo with Mercurial…
hg clone http://hg.libsdl.org/SDL
build it.
cd SDL
mkdir buildbot
cd buildbot
…/configure
make
sudo make install
test it!
cd SDL/test
mkdir buildbot
cd buildbot
…/configure
make
./testsprite2 # or one of many other fine test apps.
NOTES:
- This includes all the audio targets except arts, because Ubuntu pulled
the artsc0-dev package, but in theory SDL still supports it.
- DirectFB isn’t included because the configure script (currently) fails
to find it at all. You can do “sudo apt-get install libdirectfb-dev” and
fix the configure script to include DirectFB support. Send patches.
- Both of these prior notes were true for Ubuntu 11.04 too. Maybe it’s
time to drop these targets.
–ryan.
SDL mailing list
SDL at lists.libsdl.org
http://lists.libsdl.org/listinfo.cgi/sdl-libsdl.org
–
Gabriel.
Oh, I forgot about that! I’ll update it.
–ryan.On 5/24/14, 10:03 AM, Gabriel Jacobo wrote:
FWIW, the previous version of these instructions is preserved in
README-linux.txt