This is a strange one. I just compiled and installed 4/29 snapshot of qemu (all files in /usr/local).
Before compilation: $ which sdl-config /usr/local/bin/sdl-config $ ./configure $ make #make install $ ldd /usr/local/bin/qemu libSDL-1.2.so.0 => /usr/local/lib/libSDL-1.2.s0.0 (0xb7e84000) .. $ /usr/local/bin/qemu -cdrom ./image.iso -boot d -m 128 -localtime Could not initialize SDL - exiting The above procdure used to work before on this Linux box :-( -ishwar