How to build Gem on Microsoft Windows (MINGW)

How to build Gem on Microsoft Windows using MinGW

This document describes how to build Gem on W32 using MinGW

Requirements

Tool chain

MinGW

You need MinGW in order to install Gem. Get the newest installer from their website, and install (at least):

• mingw-developer-toolkit
• mingw32-base
• mingw32-gcc-g++
• msys-base

also make sure you have the following dev package installed

• mingw32-pthreads-w32

I have used the default installation target, which will install everything to C:\MinGW\. Since we need the MinGW Shell (which I find installed as C:\MinGW\msys\1.0\msys.bat), I created a shortcut from my desktop to that batch-file.

MinGW automatically mounts the W32 drives. Therefore my Pd-installation is visible as

 /c/Programme/pd

I also like to have the Gem-sources available in my MinGW home-directory, so I added the following line to the C:\MinGW\msys\1.0\etc\fstab file:

C:/Users/umlaeute/Development /home/umlaeute/src

This tells MinGW to make the Development folder in my W32-home directory available as the src folder in my MinGW-home directory.

Pure Data

You need the Pure Data sources to build Gem, either Pd-vanilla or Pd-Extended. The easiest way is to download a zip for Windows from http://puredata.info/downloads. Then unpack it.

I installed Pd-vanilla and unzipped it into C:\Programme\pd\. I will use this path in the rest of the tutorial.

Note that you probably should choose a path that does not contain spaces. E.g. C:\Program Files\pd\ is bad, it's better to use C:\pd\.

Gem

Obviously you will need the Gem sources, to compile it. See the other WIKI pages where to find it.

I put the sources into C:\Users\umlaeute\Development\GitHub\Gem.

Now, whenever I open the MinGW Shell, I can do

cd ~/src/GitHub/Gem

to find my Gem-sources (see above, how mapped the W32 directories to MinGW paths).

third party libraries

Gem has a plugin system which adds lot's of functionalities depending on the installed libraries.

You will need to have these libraries installed when building Gem, in order to be able to use them.

FTGL

For text rendering, the FTGL library is required. If you don't need text display within Gem, you can skip this part, and add --without-ftgl to the configure flags.

Download freetype (2.5.3) and FTGL (2.1.3-rc5) and extract them (I extracted them to C:\Users\umlaeute\Development\3rdparty, which is ~/src/3rdparty on MinGW).

Then build them (in the MinGW Shell).

The freetype2 build system will tell you (when running configure) that it detected "unix" as your system. While this is not strictly true, just ignore it.

cd ~/src/3rdparty/freetype-2.5.3/
./configure
make install

After installing freetype2, we can build FTGL. We have to do a few hacks in order to make FTGL recognize the W32-names of the the OpenGL libraries (which are called libopengl32 resp. libglu32, instead of the libGL and libGLU as found on un*x systems).

I hacked together a replacement for m4/gl.m4, which you can get here. Get the file and copy it into ftgl-2.1.3~rc5/m4/, replacing the existing file. Then run:

$ cd ~/src/3rdparty/ftgl-2.1.3~rc5/
$ ./autogen.sh
$ ./configure --with-gl-lib="-lglu32 -lopengl32"
$ make install

Since we will do dynamic linking, we need to put the dll's we just created into a place where W32 will find them. A good start is, the directory where the Gem-binary will live (the root of the Gem sources):

$ cp /usr/local/bin/libfreetype*.dll ~/src/GitHub/Gem/
$ cp /usr/local/bin/libftgl*.dll     ~/src/GitHub/Gem/

Building process

MinGW allows us to use the autotools.

For the following steps, I will assume that you have changed your working directory to the Gem root folder:

$ cd ~/src/GitHub/Gem/

autogen.sh

If you have cloned the git repository, you have to build the building tool yourself:

$ ./autogen.sh

configure

Next we need to run configure in order to detect all installed libraries and setup the build chain:

$ ./configure                 \
   --with-pd=/c/programme/pd  \
   --with-ftgl-CFLAGS="-I/usr/local/include $(freetype-config --cflags)"  \
   --with-ftgl-LIBS="-L/usr/local/lib -lftgl"

The first option (--with-pd=) tells configure where to find Pd.

The --with-ftgl-... flags tell the build-process how to find and use the font-rendering libraries.

Build

Finally start the build by running:

$ make

This will take a while.

If all went well, you should now have a Gem.dll in your directory, and hopefully a number of Gem-output externals and plugins:

$ ls *.dll
Gem.dll
gem_filmAVI.dll
gem_filmDS.dll
gem_imageSGI.dll
gem_videoDS.dll
gem_videoVFW.dll
gemw32window.dll

Problems

At time of writing, the modelOBJ plugin is known to fail the build. For now, you can ignore this.

In order to complete the built despite this error, use

make -k

Try it

When trying out the so-created binary within Pd, you might get an error about missing dynamic libraries.

To solve this, locate the given library and copy it next to the Gem.dll. Good starting places are /mingw/bin (aka C:\MinGW\bin) and /usr/local/bin (aka C:\MinGW\msys\1.0\local\bin).

Some libraries I needed to copy:

• libgcc_s_dw2-1.dll
• libstdc++-6.dll
• pthreadGC2.dll
• libfreetype-6.dll
• libftgl-2.dll

enabling more plugins

Enabling plugins needs to happen right before compiling Gem (or the respective plugins).

VLC - grab images using libVLC

Get VLC and install it (I assume it is installed into C:\Programme\VideoLAN\VLC).

As with VLC-2.1.5(rincewind) some hacks are needed to be able to successfully compile the videoVLC plugin:

Go to C:\Programme\VideoLAN\VLC\sdk\lib and do the following:

• remove the libvlc.la and libvlccore.la files (or move them away, or rename them)
• copy the libvlc.lib file to libvlc.dll.a
• copy the libvlccore.lib file to libvlccore.dll.a

Then you can enable VLC-support, by appending the following variables when calling ./configure:

$ configure \
# other flags go here...
	--with-libvlc-CFLAGS="-I/c/Programme/VideoLAN/VLC/sdk/include" \
	--with-libvlc-LIBS="-L/c/Programme/VideoLAN/VLC/sdk/lib -lvlc"

Finally copy the files libvlc.dll and libvlccore.dll from C:\Programme\VideoLAN\VLC next to Gem.