1 [[!meta title="cross-compiling tinc for Windows under Linux using MinGW"]]
3 ## Howto: cross-compiling tinc for Windows under Linux using MinGW
5 This howto describes how to create a Windows binary of tinc. Although it is
6 possible to compile tinc under Windows itself, cross-compiling it under Linux
7 is much faster. It is also much easier to get all the dependencies in a modern
8 distribution. Therefore, this howto deals with cross-compiling tinc with MinGW
9 under Linux on a Debian distribution.
15 * Install MinGW and Wine.
16 * Create a directory where we will perform all cross-compilations.
17 * Get all the necessary sources.
18 * Cross-compile everything.
20 ### Installing the prerequisites for cross-compilation
22 There are only a few packages that need to be installed as root to get started:
24 > sudo apt-get install mingw32 wine git-core
25 > sudo apt-get build-dep tinc
27 Other Linux distributions may also have MinGW packages, use their respective
28 package management tools to install them. Debian installs the cross-compiler
29 in `/usr/i586-mingw32msvc/`. Other distributions might install it in another
30 directory however, for example `/usr/i686-pc-mingw32/`. Check in which directory
31 it is installed, and replace all occurences of `i586-mingw32msvc` in this
32 example with the correct name from your distribution.
34 ### Setting up the build directory and getting the sources
36 We will create a directory called `mingw/` in the home directory. We use
37 apt-get to get the required libraries necessary for tinc, and use `git` to get
38 the latest development version of tinc.
42 > apt-get source openssl liblzo2-dev zlib1g-dev
43 > git clone git://tinc-vpn.org/tinc
45 ### Making cross-compilation easy
47 To make cross-compiling easy, we create a script called `mingw` that will set
48 up the necessary environment variables so configure scripts and Makefiles will
49 use the MinGW version of GCC and binutils:
52 > cat >$HOME/bin/mingw << EOF
54 > export CC=i586-mingw32msvc-gcc
55 > export CXX=i586-mingw32msvc-g++
56 > export CPP=i586-mingw32msvc-cpp
57 > export RANLIB=i586-mingw32msvc-ranlib
58 > export PATH="/usr/i586-mingw32msvc/bin:$PATH"
62 If `$HOME/bin` is not already part of your `$PATH`, you need to add it:
64 > export PATH="$HOME/bin:$PATH"
66 We use this script to call `./configure` and `make` with the right environment
67 variables, but only when the `./configure` script doesn't support cross-compilation itself.
68 You can also run the export commands from the `mingw` script by
69 hand instead of calling the mingw script for every `./configure` or `make`
70 command, or execute `$HOME/bin/mingw $SHELL` to get a shell with these
71 environment variables set, but in this howto we will call it explicitly every
76 Cross-compiling LZO is easy:
78 > cd $HOME/mingw/lzo2-2.03
79 > ./configure --host=i586-mingw32msvc
81 > DESTDIR=$HOME/mingw make install
85 Cross-compiling Zlib is also easy, but a plain `make` failed to compile the
86 tests, so we only build the static library here:
88 > cd $HOME/mingw/zlib-1.2.3.3.dfsg
91 > DESTDIR=$HOME/mingw mingw make install
95 OpenSSL is always a bit hard to compile, because they have their own
96 `Configure` script that needs some tweaking. There is also a small bug in
97 e_os2.h that breaks compilation with recent versions of GCC. First download
98 this [[openssl-cross-compilation.diff]] to your home directory, then patch
99 OpenSSL, and then compile as usual. Do not use the `-j` option when compiling
100 OpenSSL, it will break.
102 > cd $HOME/mingw/openssl-0.9.8k
103 > patch < $HOME/openssl-cross-compilation.diff
104 > mingw ./Configure --openssldir=$HOME/mingw/usr/local mingw
110 Now that all the dependencies have been cross-compiled, we can cross-compile
111 tinc. Since we use a clone of the git repository here, we need to run
112 `autoreconf` first. If you want to cross-compile tinc from a released tarball,
113 this is not necessary.
115 > cd $HOME/mingw/tinc
117 > ./configure --host=i586-mingw32msvc --with-openssl=$HOME/mingw/usr/local
122 Since Wine was installed, you can execute the resulting binary even on Linux.
123 You cannot do much however, since tinc requires a TAP-Win32 device, which is
124 not available in Wine. Still, the following command should work:
126 > $HOME/mingw/tinc/src/tincd.exe --help