Console Telnet is now capable of being compiled on gcc.  So if your excuse for not being part of the development team has been lack of a compiler, you'd better come up with something better or get to work! <grin>.  The first step is to download a compiler; one of the following should do:

• Jan-Jaap der Heijden's Mingw32-GCC page - includes GCC 2.8.1 (March 4, 1998), a very nice distribution of Mingw32.  There is also a version of GNU Make here you will want to download, especially if you download gcc a distribution that is missing Make. Note (Jan. 20, 1998): This page now contains a link to a working EGCS 1.1.1; check the FTP server.
• Colin Peters' Mingw32 page - the original Mingw32 project, distributed as a patch to Cygwin32
• Mumit Khan's EGCS port to Mingw32 and Cygwin32 - EGCS 1.1 port of Mingw32 and Cygwin32.  Does not include GNU Make.
• Antonio Mendes' EGCS 1.1-4 distribution with DirectX5 support - the English version of this page is a bit hard to read, but this version claims COM support.
• The Latest Cygwin release - now includes support for Mingw32 (-mno-cygwin) and EGCS 1.1.  Also the most updated (recent) link of the bunch.
• DJGPP+RSXNTDJ - should work in theory, but still won't produce a working telnet.exe binary.
Cygwin was the first port of gcc to the Win32 platform.  DJGPP is a DOS (32-bit) compiler, ported by DJ Delorie, but with RSXNTDJ it should be able to produce Win32 binaries.  Mingw32 is a patch to Cygwin so that it won't use the CYGWIN.DLL library.  From the Mingw32-GCC page:

Basically, Cygwin32 does two things: it implements the PE-COFF format for GCC and binutils, and it provides a transparent unix emulation layer on top of Windows. This makes it possible to rebuild large, existing unix applications with minimal changes to their source code, using GCC. The flip side of the coin is a substantial decrease in speed for both the compiler, and the applications built with it because of the overhead introduced by the unix emulation layer (`cygwin.dll'') Mingw32-GCC reuses the Cygwin32 PE-COFF support code. But, it does not attempt to be unix: it uses the Microsoft CRTDLL as it's C library. So, Mingw32-GCC, and the programs you build with it, behave like you would expect from a Windows application. They supports drive letters for example.
A side effect of using CRTDLL is that Mingw32 is thread-safe, while Cygwin32 is not.

Since the latest Cygwin release supports Mingw32, I see no reason not to use it, except for the reason that Console Telnet won't compile correctly (see below).

Now about EGCS vs. GCC: EGCS is a simply a newer version of GCC.  GCC is in a development phase right now, and EGCS is the development part.  It is fairly stable, and supports C++ much better than GCC (G++).  Note that the version number on the egcs version of gcc is egcs-2.9x-xx; this is because EGCS follows in the same version number system as GCC.

Follow the instructions that come with the distribution for installing the utilities.  Be sure to set GCC_EXEC_PREFIX and add the BIN directory to your PATH.  You can test your installation with gcc -v.  Here are a few pointers:

1. If Make complains about not being able to find Makefile, you may have a case-sensitive Make.  Simply rename MAKEFILE to Makefile or makefile.
2. For the egcs distribution of Mingw32, you may have to copy as.exe and ld.exe to the same directory as cpp.exe and cc1.exe.  This shouldn't be necessary, but at least it works.
3. If you use Cygwin, be sure to use the -mno-cygwin option.  If you don't you may end up with odd results (due to the unix emulation layer).
4. Some of the Win32 header files may not work with gcc.  Winsock.h is one of these.  Either download the latest Win32 headers or fix the lines that give you the problem (requires changing the order of some declarations).
5. The Cygnus version of gcc seems to core dump when compiling keytrans.cpp. I have no idea why. If you do get keytrans.cpp to compile, then you will need to install the Mingw32 version of libstdc++ in order to link.
The next step is to download the latest source to Console Telnet.  Previous versions probably won't compile under gcc.  You can download the latest version from the website.

If you want an IDE, there are a couple of options:

• Quincy 99 - a Windows 9x/NT IDE for C/C++ compilers
• VIDE - A freeware C++ GUI framework for Windows, X, and OS/2 that comes with a g++ IDE (get the v121-win-util.tgz file from the FTP server)
• GRASP - Graphical Representations of Algorithms, Structures and Processes (Auburn University)
• RHIDE - a DOSish development environment for DJGPP.  Has a nice interface to gdb (the GNU debugger).
• DFE95 - a Win95-style development environment, also for DJGPP, but works with Mingw32 and others.

As for help files, these pages may prove interesting:

• Virtually UN*X! Man Pages in Winhelp format.
• Windows API Reference from Inprise.com (Borland). Please read the copyright notice.
• MSDN Library

  If you feel that I've left anything out on this page, or you have any other reason to contact me, I can be reached at pbranna@clemson.edu.  Any mail concerning the development of Console Telnet should probably be sent to one of the mailing lists.