Installation ./configure make make install For the various options that you can pass to ./configure please do ./configure --help Tested platforms CPU Operating System Compiler i386 Debian GNU/Linux 3.0 GCC 2.95 [1] GCC 3.2 Intel C++ 7.0 i386 Windos XP (cygwin) GCC 2.95 [1] GCC 3.2 [1] i386 Windows XP Visual C++ 6.0 [2] [1] Does not support wchar_t based streams [2] make check fails, even though it runs correctly Microsoft Visual C++ To install using Microsoft Visual C++TM, you can do it two ways: under CygWin or from Microsoft Visual StudioTM. I heartly recommend the Cygwin approach, as it will install everything for you. Cygwin: In a bash shell do ./configure CC=`pwd`/support/cl CXX=`pwd`/support/cl support/cl is a wrapper script around the Microsoft Visual C++ compiler cl.exe. The reason d'etre of this wrapper is that I use .cc to denote source files, so I need to pass the option -Tp for each source file. CPPFLAGS="-D__WINDOWS__ -D__STDC__ -DR_OK=04" is to give some definitions we need for the nested library libltdl. For some reason Microsoft Visual C++ does not define __WINDOWS__ or similar, and likewise for __STDC__. R_OK is because the Microsoft system header file for access does not define symbolic names for the various flags one can pass to access