Building mingw32 toolchain to cross-compile Firefox

Today I’m going to compile Firefox for Windows on a Linux box. And for that I’m not going to reinvent the wheel, but follow an existing guide.

This is what I’m going to need:

• GNU Binutils – This is linker, assembler, and various other tools.
• GCC 4.3 – I have GCC 4.4.3. I might have to install GCC 4.3, if GCC 4.4.3 doesn’t play well with Dehydra.
• mingw-runtim, w32api, and Cygwin winsup – It has something to do with GCC cross compiler.
• Netscape wintools – This is something that is need for some xpidl. A quick search reveals that it (might) stands for [X]Cross Platform Interface Definition Language.
• And, off course, configuring Firefox build.

1. binutils-2.18 surprisingly installed with no problems.
2. Install mingw-runtime-3.14
3. Same for w32api-3.11.
4. Get GCC 4.3 source and winsup-src-20100315.

I had to get mpfr to install GCC, but other than that everything went without a problem.

Time to check the compiler:
[root@xxxxxx ~]# osd/mingw32/bin/i686-mingw32-gcc -v
Using built-in specs.
Target: i686-mingw32
Configured with: ../gcc-4.3.0/configure --prefix=/root/osd/mingw32/ --target=i686-mingw32 --with-gnu-ld --with-gnu-as --enable-__cxa_atexit --enable-languages=c,c++
Thread model: win32
gcc version 4.3.0 (GCC)

[root@xxxxxx ~]# osd/mingw32/bin/i686-mingw32-gcc test.c -o test.exe
[root@xxxxxx ~]# ls test*
test.c test.exe

On Windows:
C:\>test.exe
hello world!

I’m almost ready to build Firefox.

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