For more information about the port or GLib, GTk+ and the GIMP to native Windows, and pre-built binary packages, see http://www.gimp.org/win32/ or http://www.iki.fi/tml/gimp/win32/ . To build the GIMP on Win32, you can use either gcc or Microsoft Visual C++. The gcc to use should be for a mingw configuration (producing executables that don't use the cygwin dll). For more information about the preparation necessary for building with gcc, what version you want and where to get it, etc, read README.win32 in GLib 1.3 (or later). (GLib 1.3 is the developer version and thus isn't distributed per se, but available from CVS, and especially for Windows in zipfiles from the web pages mentioned above.) Unfortunately the makefiles for MSVC aren't quite up-to-date. You will have to modify them a bit if you want to use MSVC. But quite possibly by the time you read this somebody might have contributes new makefiles, or even project files. The GIMP wants to be built with the GNU "intl" library for internationalisation (i18n). Get the version ported to Win32 from the web site mentioned above. We build the "intl" library to a DLL called gnu-intl.dll to reduce name clash risks. If you don't want any i18n stuff, undefine ENABLE_NLS in the config.h.win32 file, and remove references to the gnu-intl library from the makefiles. Note that while the GNU gettext package is under the GPL (GNU General Public License), the "intl" library part as distributed with GNU libc is under the LGPL (GNU Lesser General Public License, a.k.a. GNU Library General Public License). We want the LGPL-licensed version of the intl library, even if they are the same source code, more or less. It doesn't matter for the GIMP which itself is licensed under the GPL, but it does matter for GTk+, which is licensed under the LGPL. First, build in the libgimp directory, then in app, plug-ins, and finally in modules. Check the makefile.mingw files in said directories. The current build setup for Windows is a mess, with complex hand-maintained makefiles. I know. On the other hand, I don't think using the Unix style configuration mechanism to generate mingw EXEs and DLLs is quite feasible, either. I would love to be proved wrong. --Tor Lillqvist