These instructions were based on the Enlightenment Wiki. Thanks to Vincent Torri for pointing them out.

The total size of the installation of MSYS/MinGW is around 110 MB. Be sure to have enough space on your hard disk.

MSYS, (an acronym for "Minimal SYStem"), is a command line environment based on bash, (the GNU Bourne Again Shell). This is complemented by a small collection of GNU utilities such as make, gawk, grep and sed, carefully selected to facilitate building of applications and programs which depend on traditionally UNIX tools.

FIXME: Page under construction; some useful content now, but by no means complete!!!

I will add to this as time permits; please bear with me. My intent is to provide answers to some remarkably similar, but independently asked, questions which have appeared recently, on the MinGW-Users and MinGW-MSYS lists.

Introduction

This Mini-HOWTO attempts to answer the FAQ: "Why can't the MinGW compilers find my project's header files?"

TODO: Formatting is off.

• The default rxvt font size is too small. How do I enlarge it?
  • Open C:\MSYS\1.0\msys.bat with a text editor and search for a line containing "80x25". Then replace it with:
    

     rem The following should be all one line.
     start rxvt -backspacekey ^H -sl 2500 -fg grey90 -bg black -sr -fn "Courier-bold-20" 
       -tn msys -geometry 80x25 -e /bin/sh --login -i

Where to Find Up-to-Date Source Code for MinGW Packages

In addition to sources maintained directly, and exclusively by ourselves, the MinGW Project makes use of a number of upstream sources, to deliver the package set commonly seen as defining a MinGW installation. This page explains where to find the most up-to-date source code for MinGW packages.

This page will teach you how to build MSYS and other packages from source.

First you will need to download many packages from sourceforge.

1. From the SourceForge MinGW/MSYS download page or using WINSCP (or your favourite FTP client) use one of the sourceforge mirrors to download and install the following files in the order given; note the additonal instructions for some of the steps. Note that some of these files do not appear on the MinGW/MSYS web page hence you might need to use an FTP client to get them.

About MSYS

MSYS is a collection of GNU utilities such as bash, make, gawk and grep to allow building of applications and programs which depend on traditionally UNIX tools to be present. It is intended to supplement MinGW and the deficiencies of the cmd shell.