Compiling GtkGlExt on Windows

September 21st, 2008

I was developing a 3D sample application wit Gtkmm and GtkGlExtmm. I needed to provide Windows binaries and that literally yesterday.

The developers of Gtkmm provide a all inclusive SDK and runtime installer, so that was not an issue. They actually took over maintenance for the installer and updated it to 2.12. It used to be a third party product that used in parts the glade for windows installer for Gtk+ and was always a version old. The problem was that GtkGlExt and GtkGlExtmm is not bundled with that installer, unlike other things like libxml++ are bundled with it.

On the side of GtkGlExt, there was no real help, since the binaries provided for Windows are outdated and only for GtkGlExt and not GtkGlExtmm. So I had to install the two libraries from source.

The last time I seriously developed under Windows I used Cygwin and cross built to mingw32 (native Windows) target. The reason was that Cygwin provides all necessary tools in a sufficiently recent version to bootstrap any Automake/Autoconf project and proceeded replacements for POSIX only features.

So after installing the Cygwin with the bare bones development tools, I started to build GtkGlExt. Of course it failed to build the test program in configure. I disabled the test and got it almost to compile. I fixed on odd rule in a Makefile and it finally worked fine. The same was for GtkGlExtmm. Bot took forever to complete and needed a bit of touching up. Finally I got onto my actual program. It compiled fine and then crashed with a segmentation fault. At that point my hart skipped a beat.

The reason for the test to fail, seemed to have something to do with my general setup. The first odd thing was that I needed the cygwin.dll, though I had cross built to mingw32. Although this is a common problem with C++ programs, it normally is not an issue. So I installed gdb and painfully stepped through the program, only to find out that I crashed in some trivial code in Glib::RefPtr, Glibmm’s smart pointer class. This smelled of version and compiler settings mismatch; actually It stank. At that point confused and irritated, I did not know how to really fix the problem.

I looked at the Gtk and co. binaries and found out that they where perfectly mingw32 and had zero cygwin. I then looked at my program and it needed cygwin. Since I did not have any POSIX code, the need should not have been. I figured out that It must have not used mingw32 for everything.

Since I only wanted to compile GtkGlExt and my program, I figured I did not need anything that MinGW and MSys did not provide. So I decided to install MinGW with MSys.

Configuring GtkGlExt went fine, even the test programs worked. This spurred some hope that I would get it done before this universe ends. The compile of GtkGlExt failed because some code generation scripts used from Glib needed perl. So I installed perl and cyrpt from the MSys packages and finally all went fine.

At first GtkGlExtmm did not work that fine. The reason was that there was a stray character in all CXXFLAGS within the Makefiles. Suddenly I remembered the other reason why I used cygwin last time. Well I found the stray SOH (Start of Heading) character and replaced it with a space. Now all worked fine.

I finally got my program to compile and run. Boy was I relived as this workd. The best part is I now have a sane build envirnement on my Windows PC for Gtk, something I pushed off for a relative long while.

HOWTO Compile GtkGlExt on Windows

You need:

  1. Install MinGW. This should be stright forward, but check that g++ and make are installed.
  2. Install MSys. Again simple installer.
  3. Copy the perl and crypt package to a place you find again, like C:\msys\1.0\home\username.
  4. Open a MSys shell and type cd /
  5. Untar perl: tar -xjf /home/usename/perl-5.6.1-MSYS-1.0.11-1.tar.bz2
  6. Untar crypt: tar -xjf /home/usename/crypt-1.1-1-MSYS-1.0.11-1.tar.bz2
  7. Copy GtkGlExt and GtkGlExtmm source to a place find again. C:\msys\1.0\home\username.
  8. In the MSys shell go the place with your sources: cd /home/username
  9. Set the environement variable PKG_CONFIG_PATH to msys local path: export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig
  10. Untar GtkGlExt: tar -xzf gtkglext-1.2.0.tar.gz
  11. Enter the GtkGlExt source tree: cd gtkglext-1.2.0
  12. Configure, build and install GtkGlExt: ./configure && make && make install
  13. Exit GtkGlExt source tree: cd ..
  14. Untar GtkGlExtmm: tar -xzf gtkglextmm-1.2.0.tar.gz
  15. Enter the GtkGlExtmm source tree: cd gtkglextmm-1.2.0
  16. Configure, build and install GtkGlExtmm: ./configure && make && make install

Now you are done. You can find the binaries in C:\msys\1.0\local\bin, along with all other stuff required to build your application.

Binary GtkGlExt

Alternativly you can use my build result and downlaod gtkglextmm-120-win32.tar.gz.

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