Preparing the Cygwin VM

  1. Install Oracle VirtualBox
  2. Create new virtual machine. Assign at least 20 Gb of virtual disk space and at least 2 Gb of virtual RAM to the newly created virtual machine.
  3. Install Windows (preferrably XP SP2) into the virtual machine and enter default username without non-English characters and spaces (preferrably "User"). Filesystem of disk C: should be NTFS.
  4. After installation of virtual OS, install Oracle Guest Additions and enable Shared Folder with a host system.
  5. Download setup.exe from https://www.cygwin.com/ and install Cygwin (preferrably all packages) to the folder having name without spaces (preferrably "C:\Cygwin"). Downloading all packages from the Internet may take a long time.
  6. When done, shutdown the Cygwin VM and take snapshot "SNAP-1".


>> Read next section or buy already prepared cross-compiler (€10) to save your time.