primitive graphics application

[Dave Smead <smead@...>]

Greetings,

I'm a Lua newbie, but a programmer of many years using C and Python.
I've used Linux exclusively since 1994, Debian most of that time and
presently using Ubuntu 8.10.

At the moment I'm still having some difficulties getting Lua packages
installed because I'm not up to speed on luarocks yet.  I'm a little
hesitant to download packages outside the luarocks mechanism because I'm
painfully aware that grabbing a tar.gz file and running make will
sometimes clobber library versions that are used by programs obtained
via apt-get, (that is make a mess that is difficult to clean up).

My immediate interest is using Lua to access graphics primitives such as
draw-line, draw-circle, draw-arc, etc.  I see there are bindings to SDL,
opengl, wx, tk and others.  While I need some gui widgets, mostly I need
widgets that represent analog meters, and trend graphs, (plots). I have
C code from the 1980's that ran on DOS with a primitive vgalib so
primitive is fine for what I need.

Can anyone offer opinions of which graphics library would be best
suited?

The graphics rendering program will run on a Linux machine, but I want
to connect it via a TCP socket to a very small microcomputer that tells
the rendering program what to draw using ASCII strings, or better yet,
by passing a Lua table to the rendering program.

Thanks in advance for any words of wisdom.


David Smead
www.amplepower.com