Table of Contents
Note
This document is a so-called one-shot document. It is here to describe the installation of wxWidgets with MingW / MSYS for a certain version at a certain time (Spring 2006).
This document is not maintained. I will not answer support questions. I will not make changes or provide additional information.
If you feel like you would like to maintain this document, please let me know and I will provide you with the source files.
You must have a working installation of MinGW and MSYS. MinGW must be installed with support for g++.
The current wxWidgets distribution can be downloaded from the wxWidgets website. In the left
column, click on download. Then, under
stable releases click on
windows. In the
sourceforge section, click on the
installable version, at the time of this writing (Apr 06) called
wxMSW-2.6.3-Setup-1.exe. Select a
sourceforge mirror and wait for the download (approx. 17.5 MB).
Installing wxWidgets is easy and doesn't take long. Unfortunately you'll have to compile it afterwards, which takes a while. Here are some screenshots from the installation
When wxWidgets asks for an installation path, you may chose any path you like, but make sure it does not contain any spaces, as they will break some of the scripts. I would recommend the default setting.
The installation will set the WXWIN environment variable for you. You will have to log out and log back in to ensure that it is actually set for every program. (Rebooting works equally well).
After you have downloaded wxWidgets, you need to compile it for your environment. This takes a while, so start it and then go get lunch.
You will have to use the MSYS window. You can find it in (Start / Programs / MSys / MSYS). This is a Unix-like environment in your windows computer.
Change to your wxWidgets directory:
cd $WXWIN
The yellow/orange part should show something like:
/c/wxWidgets-2.6.3. If that is not the
case, make sure you've logged out and back in.
Next, configure wxWidgets for your system. Type (all in one line!):
./configure --enable-optimise --enable-stl --enable-unicode --disable-threads --enable-static --disable-shared --enable-monolithic
This takes a short while (on current computers about 5 minutes). So only grab a quick coke. It displays a lot, including warnings. It is very safe to just ignore those. When it is done it should show something like this (your output may be slightly different):
Configured wxWidgets 2.6.3 for `i686-pc-mingw32'
Which GUI toolkit should wxWidgets use? msw
Should wxWidgets be compiled into single library? yes
Should wxWidgets be compiled in debug mode? no
Should wxWidgets be linked as a shared library? no
Should wxWidgets be compiled in Unicode mode? yes
What level of wxWidgets compatibility should be enabled?
wxWidgets 2.2 no
wxWidgets 2.4 yes
Which libraries should wxWidgets use?
jpeg builtin
png builtin
regex builtin
tiff builtin
zlib builtin
odbc no
expat builtin
libmspack no
sdl no
gnomeprint no
hildon no
Now compile wxWidgets by running make:
make
This takes a long time (between 20 minutes and 1 hour on modern systems) and has lots of output. Don't wait for it. Go do something else in the mean time.
To save disk space, you may now delete the compiled object files. This does no harm, since they will be recreated if you compile again. In MSYS, type
cd $WXWIN rm *.o
For a quickstart example and further information how to program wxWidgets using eclipse see my wxWidgets using Eclipse and the CDT HowTo.