Building FLTK 1.3.3 with MSYS/MinGW on Windows 8.1

Downloading the compiler and FLTK sources

• Download the MinGW and MSYS installer (usually called mingw-get-setup.exe) from here (SourceForge)
• Download the FLTK source from here

 Setting our environment variables

• Make sure the MinGW bin directory is the FIRST DIRECTORY listed on your System Environment Variable
• Completing the above process will help you avoid any possible conflicts during the build process

 Extraction and building

• If you don't know how to extract a tar.gz file there is a guide here (nixCraft)
• Start the MinGW prompt (C:\MinGW\msys\1.0\msys.bat), cd to the directory where you extracted the FLTK source and type the following...

 Ensuring a completely static build

• Now find the fltk-config file (which is usually located at C:\MinGW\msys\1.0\local\bin) and add the following at the location shown...
• -static-libgcc and -static-libstdc++
• These modifications will ensure that your applications built with FLTK will have no unnecessary dependencies

 Extra compilation commands for building OpenGL programs

• If you want to use OpenGL you'll need to have #define HAVE_GL 1 at the beginning of your program file
• You'll also need to add --use-gl on your command-line too
• So the following will be used to compile an OpenGL example called gl_example.cxx
• fltk-config --use-gl --compile gl_example.cxx