Tuesday, March 20, 2012

Building Meld for Cygwin

This was harder than I thought, but by the end I felt pretty silly. Oh well here it goes:
  • Download and run the setup.exe from Cygwin. If you already have Cygwin you can skip this step.
  • In addition to the Cygwin defaults, select X11 and Gnome. This should install "make" and some other packages you'll need to build Meld, that are not installed by default. I think Cygwin installs Python 2.6.7 by default (they are not up to 2.7.2 yet) but if you want to be extra careful expand the Python packages and make sure it is installed (should say 2.6.7 and/or keep).
  • Download the Meld source, copy to your ~/downloads folder and run ...
    • user$ tar -Jxvf filename
  • (see man tar). I personally like to keep all my Cygwin downloads in my Cygwin folders for easier navigation, otherwise you have to prefix cygdrive to all of your windows paths.
  • Navigate to the extracted folder and run ...
    • user$ make install
  • Hopefully you won't have any errors.
  • Start Cygwin/X - the easiest way is from the windows start menu in all programs. You should find Cygwin/X and Xserver. You'll know it's running when a window opens and you see the X in your system tray. To start Xserver from the Cygwin bash run ...
    • user$ startxwin
    • user$ startx
  • In the X window type meld, and if you're lucky it should run!

  • Another useful online resource is CyGNOME.
So now you have a successful Meld build in Cygwin. But you could have easily done this on Windows without Cygwin or on a Linux machine or Mac with zero effort.

For Meld on Windows see:

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