[vtkusers] VTK with Mingw/GCC and Dev-Cpp IDE

[Matt Valerio]

Hello,

Has anyone had any luck using VTK and/or CMake with the (freeware) 
Dev-Cpp IDE?

Dev-Cpp runs on Win32, but uses a port of GCC called Mingw to do the 
compilation, and requires Linux-style libraries (.a extension), while 
the precompiled version of VTK for Win32 uses .lib libraries.

I tried to compile Linux-style libraries using the VTK source.  That 
required that I install CMake for Cygwin, which compiled fine from the 
CMake source.  Then I was sucessful in creating all of the .a libraries 
with the VTK source, after running CMake and then make.

However, these .a libraries will not link correctly using Mingw.

Are there any plans to support Mingw targets in CMake?  I tried creating 
"Unix Makefiles' with the win32 version of CMake, but it complained of 
serious configuration errors and did not work, even after I pointed it 
to the correct Mingw executables such as ar.exe, gcc.exe, and g++.exe.

Any experiences or information I can find out regarding this subject 
would be greatly appreciated!  I want to be able to use VTK but I am a 
poor college kid and cannot afford Visual Studio.  Dev-Cpp is the best 
freeware C/C++ compiler I have found.

Thanks in advance,
Matt V.