Last week announced the availability of Fedora 11. This new release entails Windows cross-compilers
introduced by Fedora’s MinGW Special Interest Group.
The aim is to eliminate duplication of work for application developers by providing a range of libraries and development tools which have already been ported to the cross-compiler environment. This means that developers will not need to recompile the application stack themselves, but can concentrate just on the changes needed to their own application.
Though this feature will interest a wide range of software developers, I believe EDA vendors will also be very interested. I will demonstrate a quick example of how to use these Windows cross-compilers.
In this demo, I will use gerbv, a gerber viewer and the example “Temperature Collector” developed by Levente Kovacs.
To install gerbv on fedora,
# yum install gerbv
The above screenshot shows gerbv compiled under a normal Linux “configure && make”. Now we will compile the same gerbv for Windows.
1. Download the sources of gerbv.
2. Setup your Fedora 11 Linux
# yum install mingw32-gcc mingw32-gtk2 mingw32-crossreport mingw32-nsiswrapper wine
3. Configure Wine.
4. Extract gerbv sources.
5. Compilation of gerbv for Windows
$ cd gerbv-2.2.0
$ mingw32-configure
$ mingw32-make
The final Windows executable file of gerbv will be stored in src/.libs/ as gerbv.exe together with its DLL file, libgerbv-1.dll.
6. Launch gerbv.exe under wine
$ wine src/.libs/gerbv.exe
7. Test gerbv.exe under windows.
Under windows, extra DLLs are required and these can be downloaded from The GTK+ Project or simply from here.
The gerber files used in this example, my compiled gerbv.exe and libgerbv-1.dll can be downloaded from here.
mingw32-nsiswrapper can later be used for building automated Windows installers for distribution.
I hope this short crash course will help you. For any additional details, please join the Fedora Mingw mailing list or IRC: #fedora-mingw on FreeNode.
References:
- Fedora IRC Classroom – Using the Windows cross-compiler with Richard Jones
- Windows cross compiler Feature wiki page
