I guess this has been asked many times already but I was wondering if there is any really lightweight library thats already installed on most linux boxes that I can directly use for drawing :
1. textboxes or textfields
2. volume meters like the ones shown in KMixer

I need to show some rapidly varying values and thats all really....some buttons, gauges thats all...GTK and KDE seem to heavy weight but they seem to be the only ones which are installed by default on most distros.

I do not want to use SDL or opengl and then another library for rendering gui on top of them as SDL and opengl are not installed on many systems and i will move my code around quite a bit. It should be as simple as :

gcc main.c
./a.out

Any such options ?.....and yeah I dont want to worry about what version is installed in my target system etc..I will be compiling once anyway and not distributing binaries.

That's impossible, because no matter what toolkit you use you need to tell gcc to include the library.

I don't see the problem with using GTK+, because it seems to be the most commonly available, it's much more light-weight than Qt, and IMO relatively easy to program.

I don't know very much about making widgets and things like this, but maybe FLTK (Fast Light ToolKit) would be worth looking into?

Sorry if this isn't ideal for the requirements, but it's nice and small!

Sasha

right I think I will go with gtk...the only reason I cant use FLTK is because it may not be available by default on most distros. I have no problem with adding compiler flags of course...but I may not always have root access to install libraries. I am mostly targeting Ubuntu and Opensuse.

btw...Sasha..I see you are using Slackware64.....can you tell me which distro specifically...I am currently using SLAX on Qemu so I can access Linux on windows.

right I think I will go with gtk...the only reason I cant use FLTK is because it may not be available by default on most distros. I have no problem with adding compiler flags of course...but I may not always have root access to install libraries. I am mostly targeting Ubuntu and Opensuse.

btw...Sasha..I see you are using Slackware64.....can you tell me which distro specifically...I am currently using SLAX on Qemu so I can access Linux on windows.

What do you mean? Slackware IS a distro on its own!

Hmm, yes, I'm using Slackware13.0 64bit.

Xlib is installed by default and is the most basic toolkit, but not the easiest, xmessages and xdialog (or any drop in clone) are also installed in most distro.

-~-~-

Right thanks guys...I ll try with GTK then and see how it goes....right now I am using SLAX with virtual box and I ll try out slackware 13 64 bit.