MinGW/MSYS

Getting started (for the experienced)

Get yourself a copy of mingw-get, extract the archive into your MinGW directory following established rules.

Getting started (for the inexperienced)

Note: The mingw-get version number in this document was valid at the time of writing. Be sure to adapt to the current version when you read this!

1. Create a MinGW directory somewhere.

   • Keep the path as short as possible, you'll thank me later

   • Make sure the path leading up to your "MinGW" directory does *not* contain spaces or non-ASCII characters. For example, C:\MinGW and D:\bin\mingw are good choices but C:\Program Files\MinGW is a very bad idea!

2. point your browser of choice at http://sourceforge.net/projects/mingw/files/

3. click Installer

4. click mingw-get

5. click mingw-get-0.5-beta-20120426-1

6. download mingw-get-0.5-mingw32-beta-20120426-1-bin.zip

7. extract the contents of mingw-get-0.5-mingw32-beta-20120426-1-bin.zip into your MinGW directory

Installing MinGW and MSYS

Note: If you're behind a restrictive/authenticating corporate firewall and mingw-get fails to download the package catalogs or packages you should start Internet Explorer and navigate to some website like www.mingw.org, then try again.

Open a command prompt (cmd.exe), navigate to your MinGW/bin directory and execute following commands::

> mingw-get update
> mingw-get install mingw-get
> copy ..\var\lib\mingw-get\data\defaults.xml ..\var\lib\mingw-get\data\profile.xml
> mingw-get install "mingw32-gcc=4.6.2*"
> mingw-get install "mingw32-g++=4.6.2*"
> mingw-get install mingw-developer-toolkit
> mingw-get install "mingw32-gdb=7.4*"
> ..\msys\1.0\msys.bat

You will find yourself looking at a bash session. Right click the icon in the title bar and click "Properties". Go to the Options tab and enable QuickEdit Mode. Go to the Font tab and select ucida Console. Click the "OK" button.

Back in your bash session, execute /postinstall/pi.sh to finilize your MinGW/MSYS installation. It should look something like this:

$ /postinstall/pi.sh

This is a post install process that will try to normalize between
your MinGW install if any as well as your previous MSYS installs
if any.  I don't have any traps as aborts will not hurt anything.
Do you wish to continue with the post install? [yn ] y

Do you have MinGW installed? [yn ] y

Please answer the following in the form of c:/foo/bar.
Where is your MinGW installation? C:/MinGW

Creating /etc/fstab with mingw mount bindings.
        Normalizing your MSYS environment.

You have script /bin/cmd
You have both /bin/ftp.exe and /bin/ftp.
Removing /bin/ftp.

Oh joy, you do not have C:/MinGW/bin/make.exe. Keep it that way.

Close this bash session (type exit or ^D followed by <return> or <enter>) and start ..\msys\1.0\msys.bat again.

Optionally create yourself a shortcut to the above msys.bat file to save yourself some typing time. If you do, remember to enable QuickEdit Mode and change the Fontsettings as described above for the shortcut you create.

Using msysgit

Download from http://code.google.com/p/msysgit/

Configure it to setup git in your PATH, it's should? be safe.

Make sure autocrlf is set to false before cloning repositories!

gitconfig can be found in C:/Program Files/Git/etc/gitconfig (or where you installed it)