robertmuench.de

To the point & Out of the box


Actually there are two things you need to create your Linux compatible build environment:

  1. The MinGW envrionment
  2. The MSYS environment (a minimalistic shell and tool environment that supports a lot of Unix tools)

My biggest problem was, that all the docs are a big mess. All mentioned downloads are available from
here. So here is a simple to follow step-by-step way:

  1. Download the Automated MinGW Installer
  2. Install it
  3. Download the MSYS-*.tar.bz2 package from the MSYS Base System section. This is the basic MSYS stuff you need.
  4. Install it
  5. Cross-check C:\msys\1.0\etc\fstab to include a line that makes your MinGW installation availabe to MSYS. For example I have MinGW installed into C:\programme. Hence I added a line like this: C:/programme/mingw /mingw This tells MSYS to mount my MinGW installation at /mingw within the MSYS environment.

What is important to understand is that if you want to use the MSYS environment, you have to download special versions of programs. These special versions have a MSYS in their filenames. Most of the time there is a pure MinGW version of these tools as well. There the MSYS filenamepart is missing.

  1. Now download all the MSYS tools that you need. These tools are spreaded over two sections: MSYS Base System and MSYS Supplementary Tools. There is no complete package containning all tools. So, have fun to download every file step by step.
  2. The installation is quite simple: Extract the archives to the MSYS base directory (c:\msys\1.0\...)

The hard part is to collect all the dependencies to get the tools running. Some toosl require Perl, so first get this, others need special libs etc. Again it’s a big mess and far away from a one-click install.

I think about adding a archive with a complete install. Let me know if this would be good.