Graphical Installer Interface: Pre-Release Snapshots Available

While still under development, and not yet ready for formal release, the graphical user interface to the MinGW installation tool, mingw-get, is progressing nicely. In the interim, prior to formal release, development snapshots are being made available from http://preview.tinyurl.com/cmhx9p6; the latest may be downloaded from http://preview.tinyurl.com/d93t5hf

These snapshots are being made available for the benefit of those users who are interested in the graphical front-end to mingw-get, (which should be all users), and in particular, those users who would like to play a part in influencing its future development. Any who may be unsure should note this comment, from one early adopter:

1st impression is very good.

In fact, good enough that I recommend that everyone should install this now.

It is clearly a work in progress, with several desirable parts, such as help, not yet present,
but it is nevertheless very useful, and the existing components are a great improvement over
the command-line functionality.

It is now easy to see what is installed and what is not.

It is now very easy to read the description of a package, and it is very easy to move around
in the package list to see what is available and compare descriptions of different packages.

Marking uninstalled packages for installation is simple and easy; the absence of the help is
not a problem at all, it is very obvious.

Installing a Snapshot

To deploy any snapshot, you must already have installed a current version of the command line implementation mingw-get. If you have not previously installed mingw-get, then please run mingw-get-inst-20120426.exe first.

Note: if you've just run mingw-get-inst-20120426.exe, and you chose to update the catalogue to latest issue during this first-time installation, rather than using the long-out-of-date bundled catalogue), you may omit the "mingw-get update" step, in the following.

When the command line client has been installed, please check that running:

mingw-get update
mingw-get show mingw-get-bin

indicates that the installed version matches the current repository version; if not, and the installed version is shown as "None", then you should run:

mingw-get install mingw-get-bin

otherwise, if the versions differ, you should run

mingw-get upgrade mingw-get-bin

Once you have confirmed that you have a current installation, you may download the *-bxz.zip snapshot from the above download link, and unzip it into the root of your MinGW installation tree, (i.e. the parent of the bin directory in which your mingw-get.exe lives). After you have done this, you may run:

mingw-get install --start-menu mingw-get-gui

to install the GUI client, (and upgrade the CLI client to a compatible snapshot version). This should also create a mingw-get short-cut in your start menu; you may wish to review the upgraded defaults.xml file, (in the <mingw-root>/var/lib/mingw-get/data directory), for guidance on how to switch that --start-menu option on by default, by adding a preferences section to your profile.xml file, (in that same directory).