Re: Quick into to porting to Win32...

[John Cupitt <jcupitt gmail com>]

On Sat, 11 Sep 2004 03:22:31 -0400 (EDT), Freddie Unpenstein
<fredderic excite com> wrote:
> what's the easiest way for me to get one of my personal GTK+ 2.x
creations running under Windows, and in a form which I can easily
install on a friends machine thereafter.

I build a win32 version of my app like this:

- install mingw/msys ... http://mingw.org/

- unzip pretty much all of the packages Tor lists on his win32 page
... http://www.gimp.org/~tml/gimp/win32/downloads.html

- now you should be able to build and run (from bash in msys) most gtk
programs, but try a "hello world" program to start ... you may find
you need to rework parts of your app to remove *nix-isms, the glib
helper funcs are very useful for this

- for distribution, tell your users to run Jernej's easy GTK runtime
installer ... http://www2.arnes.si/~sopjsimo/gimp/stable.html ... and
then just send them your .exe

- or install Jernej's gtk on your system, copy the tree of files under
"Common Files/gtk/2.0/", rename as the name of your app, drop your
.exe into the bin directory, zip up and send to your users ... they
then run by unzipping, clicking into the bin/ folder and
double-clicking on your .exe

> From reading this group I get the impression GTK+ 2.x isn't really up
to speed on Windows.

It actually works pretty well IMO, perhaps slightly behind the *nix
version, but not by much. Gtk2 on win32 is far, far better than gtk1.2
on win32.