Install (MinGW)

This document contains instructions for building OpenBabel (OB) on Windows with MinGW. The resulting DLL (libopenbabel-3.dll) may be linked directly from Windows applications compiled with MinGW, so there is no need to deal with (import) libraries created with Microsoft Visual C++. This is especially useful if your existing software uses a GNU make based build system. Binaries created with MinGW are native and do not need an emulation layer, such as Cygwin.

Date: March 31, 2009, Tested with OB 2.1.1 and 2.2.1 on Windows Vista.

Preliminaries:

OB requires libxml2; libxml can be found here. Specifically, this requires you to edit the xml2-config script. I recommend you directly link a test application against libxml2.dll and insert the respective -I and -L flags into xml2-config. The relevant section of mine looks like this:

    --cflags)
        echo -I/home/libxml2-2.7.3.win32/include/libxml -I/home/libxml2-2.7.3.win32/include

and

    --libs)
        echo /c/Windows/System32/libxml2.dll -liconv -lm -Wl,-s -lwsock32 -liberty

OB requires zlib; zlib can be found here. Make sure OB can find the header files and DLL during configuration by prior adding the respective directories to your $PATH environment variable.

Install current Msys and MinGW version. Unpack OB source, start Msys and change to OB directory. Warning: I experienced "object name conflicts" during compilation when the $PATH contained the windows\system32 directory at the beginning.

Build OB 2.1.1:

./configure

You may want to leave out boost and/or loading of dynamic modules: ./configure --without-boost --disable-dynamic-modules.

cd src/formats/inchi
make
cd ../../../tools

Edit the Makefile and exchange the following lines

babel_DEPENDENCIES = ../src/libopenbabel.la
babel_LDADD = ../src/libopenbabel.la

with

babel_DEPENDENCIES = ../src/libopenbabel.la $(formats_objects)
babel_LDADD = ../src/libopenbabel.la $(formats_objects)

Repeat the editing for the rest of the executables if you need more than babel.exe. Then continue to build and install OB. The tools as well as the DLL will be placed in /local/bin (C:\Msys\local\bin).

cd ..
make
make install

Build OB 2.2.1:

Update the g++ compiler to version 4 (g++-sjlj, see also the release notes). Unpack gcc-g++-4.2.1-sjlj-2.tar.gz and gcc-core-4.2.1-sjlj-2.tar.gz in your MinGW root directory

./configure CXX=g++-sjlj

You may want to leave out boost and/or loading of dynamic modules by adding this to the configure command: --without-boost --disable-dynamic-modules.

make

Compilation of libopenbabel-3.dll breaks due to missing zlib support. You may manually fix this by repeating the last failed command and adding the file path to zlib.dll.

--Amaunz 07:18, 31 March 2009 (PDT)