MinGW Under Wine Howto

My take on a simple lazy way to install and use MinGW under linux

On several occasions i've needed to produce a windows and a linux version of a simple utility. If you have multiple virtual machines on your desktop then its probably a non issue, but I have (for many reasons) a separate Windows and Linux machine in my office. Even with the common NFS/SMB file server in the middle it can get a bit tedious to compile and test on machine one, then move chair and do it again on machine 2.

I decided the best way to build windows a linux binaries on the same machine. It is possible to roll the MinGW patch set into the gcc source and build a version of gcc with a new target, no thanks! Life is too short. A simpler way is to install MinGW under Wine, then use common bash build scripts to build binaries for both targets.

The following is a step by step guide and some example scripts.

Step 1, install and test Wine: Currently im using Fedora Core, or more accurately my machine has been using Fedora core for 4 years and I cant be bothered with pain of reinstalling it. Installing Wine is pretty simple, use "yum install wine". Debian based systems can just "apt-get install wine".

Step 2, Download and install MinGW. Assuming the Wine install worked this is really simple. Currently the stable release of MinGW is 5.4.1, so find and download "MinGW-5.1.4.exe", from a bash prompt make it executable "chmod +x ./MinGW-5.1.4.exe" then just run the installer under Wine "./MinGW-5.1.4.exe". If Wine is working correctly then you should get the graphical windows installer, just keep clicking next until you get a default install.

From the users home directory you should now have files like these :

[jon ~]% ls -l .wine/drive_c/MinGW/
total 320
drwxrwxr-x 2 jon jon   4096 2009-09-17 15:30 bin
-rw-rw-r-- 1 jon jon  17992 2000-12-18 22:47 COPYING
-rw-rw-r-- 1 jon jon  26430 2001-01-29 14:32 COPYING.LIB
drwxrwxr-x 3 jon jon   4096 2009-09-17 15:30 doc
drwxrwxr-x 5 jon jon  12288 2009-09-17 15:30 include
drwxrwxr-x 2 jon jon   4096 2009-09-17 15:30 info
-rw-rw-r-- 1 jon jon    245 2009-09-17 15:30 installed.ini
drwxrwxr-x 3 jon jon   4096 2009-09-17 15:30 lib
drwxrwxr-x 3 jon jon   4096 2009-09-17 15:30 libexec
drwxrwxr-x 5 jon jon   4096 2009-09-17 15:30 man
drwxrwxr-x 4 jon jon   4096 2009-09-17 15:30 mingw32
-rwxrwxr-x 1 jon jon 140095 2009-09-17 15:28 MinGW-5.1.4.exe
-rw-rw-r-- 1 jon jon   1353 2009-09-17 15:31 mingw.ini
-rw-rw-r-- 1 jon jon   1327 2008-04-26 14:43 mingw.ini.old
-rw-rw-r-- 1 jon jon     48 2009-09-17 15:30 MinGW.url
-rwxrwxr-x 1 jon jon  67620 2009-09-17 15:30 uninst.exe

Step 3, Add some paths. In my case to make life easy I wanted all users to have a path to a copy of MinGW, so I added this "PATH=:/sbin:/.wine/drive_c/MinGW/bin" to the bottom of /etc/bashrc. Now logout for the user, and log back in. Check path has worked with "echo $PATH" then try this and check you have two working compilers:

[jon ~]% gcc --version
gcc (GCC) 4.1.2 20070925 (Red Hat 4.1.2-27)
Copyright (C) 2006 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
This is free software; see the source for copying conditions.  There is NO
warranty; not even for MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

[jon ~]% gcc.exe --version
gcc.exe (GCC) 3.4.5 (mingw special)
Copyright (C) 2004 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
This is free software; see the source for copying conditions.  There is NO
warranty; not even for MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

Step 4 This is a simple example program and build script to illustrate how to tie it all together, cut&paste this into a file called compilertest.c Check it compiles as a Linux and Windows executable like this :

#include <stdio.h>
main()
{
	printf("Useless test program\n");
}


[jon compilertest]% cc compilertest.c 
[jon compilertest]% gcc.exe compilertest.c 
[jon compilertest]% ls -l
total 28
-rwxrwxr-x 1 jon jon 15852 2009-09-18 14:54 a.exe
-rwxrwxr-x 1 jon jon  4818 2009-09-18 14:54 a.out
-rw-rw-r-- 1 jon jon   114 2009-09-18 14:53 compilertest.c
[jon compilertest]% file a.out 
a.out: ELF 32-bit LSB executable, Intel 80386, version 1 (SYSV), dynamically linked (uses shared libs), for GNU/Linux 2.6.9, not stripped
[jon compilertest]% file a.exe 
a.exe: MS-DOS executable PE  for MS Windows (console) Intel 80386 32-bit
[jon compilertest]% ./a.out 
Example useless program
[jon compilertest]% ./a.exe 
Example useless program

Step 5 Tie it all togther with a bash build script, note the "-D MINGW" argument in gcc.exe line, this sets a definition for a preprocessor variable MINGW. If you have any windows specific code then you can wrap it in #ifdef MINGW #endif.

#!/bin/bash
# Example script called "compile"
#
gcc compilertest.c -o compilertest
if [ -f ./compilertest ]; then
        echo "Ok, built linux executable"
fi

if [ -f $HOME/.wine/drive_c/MinGW/bin/gcc.exe ]; then
        gcc.exe compilertest.c -o compilertest.exe -D MINGW
        if [ -f ./compilertest.exe ]; then
                echo "Ok, built Windows executable"
        fi
fi