• Windows NT, 2000 or XP (Windows 9.x may not work due to limitations of command.com)
• A svn client for svn checkouts (for example Subversion or TortoiseSVN)
• The latest full MinGW Package from http://www.mingw.org - currently this is MinGW-5.1.1

Install MinGW

• Please follow the instructions at MinGW documentation page.

Get the Q... sources

• by downloading a Qt 3 source snapshot from the qtwin download area
• or from the svn repository (qtwin.svn.sourceforge.net)

  checkout the sources with

  c:\source>  svn co https://qtwin.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/qtwin/qt-3/trunk qt-3

Compiling Qt with command line tools

• Open a cmd shell (make sure you haven't msys or cygwin in your PATH!)
• Setup Qt environment

  c:\source> set QTDIR=< qt3 source root >
  c:\source> set MINGW=< MinGW installation root >
  c:\source> set PATH=%QTDIR%\bin;%MINGW%\bin;%PATH%
  c:\source> set QMAKESPEC=win32-g++
  
  

• Configure and build the source
  The script first creates link_includes.exe and configure.exe which are needed for bootstrap the build process. link_includes copies all relevant Qt headers into the include-directory. configure.exe is the replacement for the ./configure-script unter Unix/Linux. After that, qmake.exe is build and the compilation gets started.

  c:\source> cd < qt3 source root >
  c:\source\qt-3> configure.bat [-fast] [-verbose]

  configure knows some of the parameters of the x11 release configure script like -fast or -verbose.
  For a full list see bin\configure.exe -help.

  This should build the whole Qt release. If it breaks you can restart compiling with

  c:\source\qt-3> mingw32-make [< target >]
    

  for a list of all available targets see the toplevel Makefile

• Start Qt applications

  c:\source\qt-3> designer
  c:\source\qt-3> assistant
  c:\source\qt-3> linguist
  c:\source\qt-3> cd tutorial\t1
  c:\source\qt-3\tutorial\t1> t1

MinGW Notes

• by jay snyder: I found that I needed to remove all references to my cygwin installation from my path, or mingw32-make was trying to use c:\cygwin\bin\sh.exe as a shell instead of CMD.EXE. Since the mingw32 makefiles for the win32-g++ qmakespec are written to use CMD.EXE, this is a problem. If I removed cygwin from my path, then the configure.bat build worked fine.
• by Ralf Habacker: Linking the shared Qt library needs much time. You can reduce the linking time by using the -static configure option.