How to guide for cross-compiling GTK+ for Win32

This is intended to be a quick-start guide for building GTK+ binaries for Win32, but from the comfort of Linux.

Bootstrap

To begin, you'll need to install mingw, the Linux/UNIX Win32 cross compiler. It allows you to build binaries for the Windows platform using a Linux box. Note you should also uninstall the Wine headers, because they cause nasty conficts with mingw's ones while compiling.

MinGW Installation instructions

Wine headers Uninstallation

Building the sources using Jhbuild

First, follow the instructions to install Jhbuild, you may want to create a new user for this task to avoid conflict problems, instead of using the standard jhbuildrc file, which has the configuration options and variables for the building environment, you should grab this standard.jhbuildrc for Gtk+ cross compilation. Once you have downloaded it, log in as this new user and type:

  cp standard.jhbuildrc ~/.jhbuildrc

Now you can start the build of gtk+ by typing:

  ~/bin/jhbuild build

Everything should be built and installed in ~/target, if you want another target directory, you should edit the jhbuildrc prefix value. For any comments on the jhbuild script and the moduleset, email me: aruiz at gnome dot org.

Building the sources from scratch

The easiest thing to do after this is to install the basic dependencies. I've made a tarball of these that you can grab from gtk-deps.tar.gz. You should extract them in /opt (they will extract into ./gtk so your build target is /opt/gtk).

mingw-configure

You'll need a mingw-configure script for building each package. Grab it here: mingw-configure

A note about optimizations: the mingw-configure attached does not include any -O optimization flags, so if you want to enable those you should edit the script. However, nasty bugs have been observed in very particular circumstances in gtk# applications when using these optimizations.

Next grab the latest glib, atk, cairo, pango, and gtk+ (either as tarballs or from svn). For each package, you'll need to copy the mingw-configure script into the root directory. Also, if you're pulling the sources out of Subversion instead of using tarballs, you will need to run ./autogen.sh before running ./mingw-configure for each package, because mingw-configure requires there to be a configure script.

Each time you call mingw-configure, you need to pass it a prefix where you would like to install the Win32 GTK. This should be somewhere that does not conflict with your system files (e.g., do NOT install it to /usr), and it probably should not be where your mingw runtime and compiler are installed. I use /opt/gtk but you can choose anywhere you want. The examples below say --prefix=$YOUR_PREFIX. You may either set an environment variable called YOUR_PREFIX=/opt/gtk or you may specify --prefix=/opt/gtk on each line.

Compiling GLib

When building GLib, you'll need to create a file called win32.cache that looks like this:

glib_cv_long_long_format=I64
glib_cv_stack_grows=no

• Copy win32.cache (shown above) into the base directory
• ./mingw-configure --enable-explicit-deps=no --cache-file=win32.cache --prefix=$YOUR_PREFIX
• make install

Compiling atk

• ./mingw-configure --enable-explicit-deps=no --prefix=$YOUR_PREFIX
• make install

Compiling cairo

• ./mingw-configure --enable-explicit-deps=no --with-x=no --enable-xlibs=no --enable-xlibs-xrender=no --prefix=$YOUR_PREFIX
• make install

Compiling pango

• ./mingw-configure --enable-explicit-deps=no --with-x=no --prefix=$YOUR_PREFIX
• make install

Compiling GTK+

• ./mingw-configure --enable-explicit-deps=no --disable-cups --prefix=$YOUR_PREFIX
• make install

Contact

If you have any problems or questions regarding this build process feel free to email me: bratsche at gnome dot org.