Installing C compilers

Finally you’re probably wondering how to get the C compilers installed for your computer. The answer here is that it depends what operating system you’re using.

Linux

Instruct your package manager to install the compilers e.g. on Ubuntu the following command will install all of the compilers and some other stuff you might want:

$ sudo apt-get install build-essential

Now you can run gcc etc in the terminal.

OSX

Install Xcode.

That will give you an editor, compilers, and a load of other stuff. You should then be able to run gcc from the terminal.

Windows

Install notepad++ to get an editor.

Windows is the trickiest platform to install compilers. To install MinGW (like on the lab machines) there are instructions here. At the time of writing (Jan 2016) I have seen that the following instructions should work:

First MinGW is not just a compiler. The MinGW project consists of several things

An environment for using MinGW software packages.
A collection of software packages (some of which we want e.g. gcc etc.).
A package manager program that can download and install the packages you want.

To install the compilers with MinGW we need to first install the “MinGW installation Manager”.

Download mingw-get-setup.exe
Run the downloaded mingw-get-setup.exe to install the MinGW Installation Manager.

Now that you have installed the Installation Manager you need to run it to install the packages we want.

Launch MinGW Installation Manager
On the left tab click “basic setup”
Then on the right tab select the following packages (by clicking the tickbox next to each package):
- mingw32-base
- mingw32-gcc-c++
- mingw32-gcc-objc
- msys-base
Go to the program menu (at the top) and choose “Intallation” and then “Apply changes”.
Click “Apply”

By default MinGW will install all of its files in the folder C:\MinGW. We have now installed the shell (sh.exe) and the compilers (gcc.exe) and some other bits that we need. The only thing left is to create a shortcut that will open a console and run the shell. Use Notepad++ to create a .bat file.

Open Notepad++, create a new file and save it on the desktop as mingw.bat. The contents of the file should be

set HOME=%HOMEPATH%
C:\MinGW\msys\1.0\bin\sh.exe --login

You should now be able to double-click that file to open the MinGW shell (it should look like it does on the lab computers). From the shell test that the command gcc works e.g.:

$ gcc
gcc: fatal error: no input files
compilation terminated.

That error message is fine. It just means that you need to tell gcc which files to compile. If instead you see

$ gcc
gcc: command not found

then it means that gcc is not installed or is not on your PATH environment variable. This could be because you didn’t install gcc but actually a common problem that I’ve seen is that the /etc/fstab file is missing. If that happens then try:

$ ls /etc

If you can see a file called fstab.sample but not a file called fstab then your fstab is missing. The file fstab.sample is an example of what this file should look like. You can fix the problem by typing

$ cp /etc/fstab.sample /etc/fstab

This will copy (cp) the fstab.sample file to /etc/fstab. Having done that close the shell and reopen it. You should then find that gcc is working.

If it still doesn’t work or if you get it to work some other way then please let me know because I want these instructions to be as good as possible.

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