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 64 Gb of virtual disk space and at least 3 Gb of virtual RAM to the newly created virtual machine.
  2. Install Windows (preferrably Windows 7 x86) into the virtual machine and enter default username without non-latin characters and spaces (preferrably "User").
  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: "C compiler" and "C++ compiler" from "MinGW compiler suite", "MSYS Basic System" and "MinGW Developer Toolkit"). It's recommended to install MinGW to default installation directory "C:\MinGW".
  5. 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.