Only an example to show how to display à JPEG image, simplied version of DirectFB's own tutorial.

Classical shebang to use Séléné as script interpretor. Obviously, the path has to be changed as per your own installation.

#!./Selene

Tell to Séléné we want to use DirectFB and pass some option to it :

• quiet : don't be verbose
• no-vt : don't force usage of the current VT (it's allowing to display on my BananaPI LCD being logged by SSH).

Selene.UseDirectFB("--dfb:quiet,no-vt")

We want whole screen and then we get its primary surface.
Finally, clear it and get its size.

DirectFB.init( DirectFB.CooperativeConst('FULLSCREEN') )
srf = SelSurface.create { caps=SelSurface.CapabilityConst('PRIMARY') }
w,h = srf:GetSize()
srf:Clear(0,0,0,0)

Load the image as ... an image provider and handle potential error (obviously, the path has to be changed as per the actual image location).

local img,err = SelImage.create("/root/trv/DirectFB-examples-1.2.0/data/wood_andi.jpg")

if not img then
    error("Can't load image")
end

Create our primary surface, clear it and retreive its size

local srf = SelSurface.create {
    caps=SelSurface.CapabilityConst('PRIMARY')
}
srf:Clear( 0,0,0,0 )
local w,h = srf:GetSize()

Render to the created surface.

img:RenderTo(
   srf,
   { 20, 20, w-40, h-40 } -- Conform to surface size, w/ 20px margins
)

with :

• the surface to render to
• the cliping area on the surface { x,y, height, width }

We don't need the orignal image anymore, releasing it

img:destroy()

Normally, we have now to refresh the display, but it's implicit here and we have only to wait for user's input.

print "Hit 'enter' key to exit"
io.stdin:read'*l'

It's over : time to do usual cleaning. It's not mandatory as Séléné takes it on his own if not explicitly made.

srf:destroy()

The full source code is here.

The image can now be manipulated as other surface : drawing, blitting ... So it a very convenient way to create fancy GUI by working directly on the background image and then add dynamically objects handled by Séléné ... it's what I'm doing for my dashboards.