1 [[!meta title="cross-compiling a Windows binary under Linux using MinGW"]]
3 ## Howto: cross-compiling a Windows binary 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 ### Setting up the build directory and getting the sources
29 We will create a directory called `mingw/` in the home directory.
30 We use apt-get to get the required libraries necessary for tinc.
34 > apt-get source openssl liblzo2-dev zlib1g-dev
35 > git clone git://tinc-vpn.org/tinc
37 ### Creating the mingw script
39 To make cross-compiling easy, we install a script called `mingw` that will set
40 up the necessary environment variables so configure scripts and Makefiles will
41 use the MinGW version of GCC and binutils:
44 > cat >$HOME/bin/mingw << EOF
46 > export CC=i586-mingw32msvc-gcc
47 > export CXX=i586-mingw32msvc-g++
48 > export CPP=/usr/bin/i586-mingw32msvc-cpp
49 > export RANLIB=i586-mingw32msvc-ranlib
50 > export PATH="/usr/i586-mingw32msvc/bin:$PATH"
54 If `$HOME/bin` is not already part of your `$PATH`, you need to add it:
56 > export PATH="$HOME/bin:$PATH"
58 You can also run the export commands from the `mingw` script by hand instead of
59 calling the mingw script for every `./configure` or `make` command, or execute
60 `$HOME/bin/mingw $SHELL` to get a shell with the right environment variables
65 Cross-compiling LZO is easy:
68 > mingw ./configure --host=mingw32
70 > DESTDIR=$HOME/mingw mingw make install
74 Cross-compiling Zlib is also easy, but a plain `make` failed to compile the
75 tests, so we only build the static library here:
77 > cd $HOME/mingw/zlib-1.2.3.3.dfsg
80 > DESTDIR=$HOME/mingw mingw make install
84 OpenSSL is always a bit hard to compile, because they have their own
85 `Configure` script that needs some tweaking. There is also a small bug in
86 e_os2.h that breaks compilation with recent versions of GCC. First download this [[openssl-cross-compilation.diff]] to your home directory, then patch OpenSSL, and then compile as usual:
88 > cd $HOME/mingw/openssl-0.9.8k
89 > patch < $HOME/openssl-cross-compilation.diff
90 > mingw ./Configure --openssldir=$HOME/mingw/usr/local mingw
96 Now that all the dependencies have been cross-compiled, we can cross-compile
97 tinc. Since we use a clone of the git repository here, we need to run
98 `autoreconf` first. If you want to cross-compile tinc from a released tarball,
99 this is not necessary.
101 > cd $HOME/mingw/tinc
103 > mingw ./configure --host=mingw32 -with-openssl=$HOME/mingw/usr/local
108 Since Wine was installed, you can execute the resulting binary even on Linux.
109 You cannot do much however, since tinc requires a TAP-Win32 device, which is
110 not available in Wine. Still, the following command should work:
112 > $HOME/mingw/tinc/src/tincd.exe --help