Preparing the MinGW VM

It's technically possible to install MinGW into your first Virtual Machine along with Cygwin, but it's recommended to set up another clean VM to ensure your cross-compiler is correctly decoupled from cygwin1.dll.

  1. Create new virtual machine. Assign at least 20 Gb of virtual disk space and at least 4 Gb of virtual RAM to the newly created virtual machine.
  2. Install Windows (preferrably XP SP3) into the virtual machine and enter default username without non-English characters and spaces (preferrably "User"). Filesystem of disk C: should be NTFS.
  3. After installation of virtual OS, install Oracle Guest Additions and enable Shared Folder with a host system.
  4. Download MinGW Installer and install MinGW (choose the following packages in "Basic Setup" mode: "mingw-developer-toolkit", "mingw32-base", "mingw32-gcc-g++", "msys-base"). It's recommended to install MinGW to default installation directory "C:\MinGW".
  5. After initial MinGW/MSYS installation, run MinGW installer again and install a few additional packages under "All Packages" — "MinGW" — "MinGW Libraries" — "MinGW Standard Library". You should choose the following packages: "mingw32-mpc", "mingw32-gmp", "mingw32-libgmpxx" and "mingw32-mpfr" (in general, everything related to gmp, mpfr and mpc).
  6. When done, shutdown the MinGW VM and take snapshot "SNAP-A".


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