the second part can be found here http://wiki.maemo.org/Game_development

if you look under the section about "SDL specific notes", look at the second bullet point. that's the issue i'm facing now. in non full screen mode, the window is aligned to the top left corner of the screen and my window is smaller than the entire screen size. so i'm getting a black border on the lower right section of the screen. ugly.

as for menus, i'll take a peek at Zenity. i just want to implement some menus in my SDL application that allows the user to configure some settings.

thanks.