Lua is a free software light-weight programming language designed
for extending applications. Lua is also frequently used as a
general-purpose, stand-alone scripting language.
There are different approaches to installing software packages. Common parameters are what packages are needed to support main package to work -dependencies.What is the machine your using software on ?architecture x86-64 ,i486,I586, i686 etc what is the OS , thus .deb -Debian , RPM red hat (from top of my head), tar.gz slackware.
Lua is a "dependency" for VLC to work.
When you ran ./configure --help. Yous system flagged up, you ain't got Lua.
Now getting packages & deps can be done via a graphical package manager, such as Synaptic which usually has some GUI to go with it.
So i agree with poorguy, one way who is to go synaptic route ..hes asking you to get it via an install using command line.Cant believe that not a core packages ? You might have to play with CLi, Ubuntu was based on Debian. Commands used to be:
$apt update // updates package listing
$apt search vlc // looks tyo see if vlc is in repo
Root is needed so as poorguy says :
sudo apt install synaptic //installs synpatic
sudo apt install vlc //installs vlc
now if you want to go old school the process is basically
$ ./configure
$ make
sudo make install
// ./configure --help should just flag up info
Now the reason i like slackware is its a bit old school ,there are now package managers that install main package and deps eg : slpkg
But you can do it the manual way:
eg
https://slackbuilds.org/repository/14.2/multimedia/vlc/
here you see all the deps needed, then can go read about them.
in summary if you go manual you have to find out, what are the desps and install them first , not unusually in the rigght order, or get a pkg manager to auto process .