Install MinGW pdcurses

Installing MinGW pdcurses

The website for pdcurses can be found here. This package works well in the MinGW environment.

1. Download a release (I chose to use PDCurses-3.3.tar.gz) to your MSYS home directory.
2. Inspect and unpack it:

$ ls -ltr
total 161
-rw-r--r--    1 wgay     Administ   329511 Sep 12 11:32 PDCurses-3.3.tar.gz

$ tar tzvf PDCurses-3.3.tar.gz | head -5
-rw------- wmcbrine/wmcbrine 1397 2007-06-13 19:15:57 PDCurses-3.3/README
-rw------- wmcbrine/wmcbrine 71613 2007-07-11 17:55:19 PDCurses-3.3/HISTORY
-rw------- wmcbrine/wmcbrine 12167 2007-07-11 17:55:19 PDCurses-3.3/IMPLEMNT
-rw------- wmcbrine/wmcbrine  4890 2007-07-08 22:25:19 PDCurses-3.3/INSTALL
-rw------- wmcbrine/wmcbrine  1172 2007-06-17 14:48:53 PDCurses-3.3/PDCurses.spec

• Change to the win32 directory and build it with make. Note especially that we are using gccwin32.mak and define DLL=Y so that it builds a DLL for us:

$ tar xzf PDCurses-3.3.tar.gz

wgay@M00022295 ~
$ cd PDCurses-3.3/win32/
$ make -f gccwin32.mak DLL=Y

• If all goes well, the build will complete with a DLL:

$ ls -l *.dll
-rwxr-xr-x    1 wgay     Administ   113753 Sep 12 11:36 pdcurses.dll

• Install this into the /mingw/bin directory (emphasis on /mingw):

$ cp pdcurses.dll /mingw/bin/.

• In order to link with it, we need the import library:

$ ls -ltr *.a
-rw-r--r--    1 wgay     Administ   206480 Sep 12 11:36 pdcurses.a

• Install this into /mingw/lib as follows (note that even though the runtime environment won't need this file, the MinGW gcc compiler will expect to find it there):

$ cp pdcurses.a /mingw/lib/libpdcurses.a

• Install the PDCurses header files:

$ cd ..
$ ls *.h
curses.h  curspriv.h  panel.h  term.h
$ cp *.h /mingw/include/.
$

• At this point, programs needing curses should be able to compile and link against it.

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Next: Installing MinGW libtool