MinGW – compile windows software on Linux

2009-02-15 2 min read Fedora Uncategorized

For all the windows developer out there, it is impossible to switch to Linux just because someone is looking for the Windows exe. Sooooooo bad. Not any more. There has been the MinGW compiler (and others) to compile the C programs on Linux box to run on Windows box. These cross compilers create windows exe and thus these can run on Windows natively without additional dll’s. That’s quite good, so how to do it.

Here’s how:

Fedora has decided to include the cross compiler in the repository . Login as root and do the following:

yum install mingw32-gcc mingw32-binutils mingw32-gtk2 mingw32-gtk-vnc mingw32-libvirt mingw32-libxml2 mingw32-nsis mingw32-nsiswrapper

This will install the required rpms to get you started. Now the part about getting started and getting software to run on windows. To get the programs compiled for windows, you can follow the simple guide <a href="http://camltastic.blogspot.com/2008/10/mingw-compile-software-for-windows.html" target="_blank">here. This guide talks about compiling the software when the configure script is available.

But otherwise if you have a simple C or cpp to compile you can simply use the mingw compiler to compile the program and you get the exe that you can try out with wine or run on windows machine. Happy coding.

Example of the coding and compiling:

cat «EOF > a.c

#include <stdio.h>
int main()
{
printf(&#8221;Amit Agarwal \n&#8221;);
}
EOF

i686-pc-mingw32-gcc a.c

wine a.exe

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