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.
11 The result is a 32-bit executable. If you want to create a 64-bit executable,
12 have a look at the [[64-bit cross-compilation example|examples/cross-compiling-64-bit-windows-binary]].
18 * Install MinGW and Wine.
19 * Create a directory where we will perform all cross-compilations.
20 * Get all the necessary sources.
21 * Cross-compile everything.
23 ### Installing the prerequisites for cross-compilation
25 There are only a few packages that need to be installed as root to get started:
27 > sudo apt-get install mingw32 wine git-core
28 > sudo apt-get build-dep tinc
30 Other Linux distributions may also have MinGW packages, use their respective
31 package management tools to install them. Debian installs the cross-compiler
32 in `/usr/i586-mingw32msvc/`. Other distributions might install it in another
33 directory however, for example `/usr/i686-pc-mingw32/`. Check in which directory
34 it is installed, and replace all occurences of `i586-mingw32msvc` in this
35 example with the correct name from your distribution.
37 ### Setting up the build directory and getting the sources
39 We will create a directory called `mingw/` in the home directory. We use
40 apt-get to get the required libraries necessary for tinc, and use `git` to get
41 the latest development version of tinc.
45 > apt-get source openssl liblzo2-dev zlib1g-dev
46 > git clone git://tinc-vpn.org/tinc
48 ### Making cross-compilation easy
50 To make cross-compiling easy, we create a script called `mingw` that will set
51 up the necessary environment variables so configure scripts and Makefiles will
52 use the MinGW version of GCC and binutils:
55 > cat >$HOME/bin/mingw << EOF
57 > export CC=i586-mingw32msvc-gcc
58 > export CXX=i586-mingw32msvc-g++
59 > export CPP=i586-mingw32msvc-cpp
60 > export RANLIB=i586-mingw32msvc-ranlib
61 > export PATH="/usr/i586-mingw32msvc/bin:$PATH"
65 If `$HOME/bin` is not already part of your `$PATH`, you need to add it:
67 > export PATH="$HOME/bin:$PATH"
69 We use this script to call `./configure` and `make` with the right environment
70 variables, but only when the `./configure` script doesn't support cross-compilation itself.
71 You can also run the export commands from the `mingw` script by
72 hand instead of calling the mingw script for every `./configure` or `make`
73 command, or execute `$HOME/bin/mingw $SHELL` to get a shell with these
74 environment variables set, but in this howto we will call it explicitly every
79 Cross-compiling LZO is easy:
81 > cd $HOME/mingw/lzo2-2.03
82 > ./configure --host=i586-mingw32msvc
84 > DESTDIR=$HOME/mingw make install
88 Cross-compiling Zlib is also easy, but a plain `make` failed to compile the
89 tests, so we only build the static library here:
91 > cd $HOME/mingw/zlib-1.2.3.3.dfsg
94 > DESTDIR=$HOME/mingw mingw make install
98 OpenSSL is always a bit hard to compile, because they have their own
99 `Configure` script that needs some tweaking. There is also a small bug in
100 e_os2.h that breaks compilation with recent versions of GCC. First download
101 this [[openssl-cross-compilation.diff]] to your home directory, then patch
102 OpenSSL, and then compile as usual. Do not use the `-j` option when compiling
103 OpenSSL, it will break.
105 > cd $HOME/mingw/openssl-0.9.8k
106 > patch < $HOME/openssl-cross-compilation.diff
107 > mingw ./Configure --openssldir=$HOME/mingw/usr/local mingw
113 Now that all the dependencies have been cross-compiled, we can cross-compile
114 tinc. Since we use a clone of the git repository here, we need to run
115 `autoreconf` first. If you want to cross-compile tinc from a released tarball,
116 this is not necessary.
118 > cd $HOME/mingw/tinc
120 > ./configure --host=i586-mingw32msvc --with-openssl=$HOME/mingw/usr/local
125 Since Wine was installed, you can execute the resulting binary even on Linux.
126 You cannot do much however, since tinc requires a TAP-Win32 device, which is
127 not available in Wine. Still, the following command should work:
129 > $HOME/mingw/tinc/src/tincd.exe --help