How to Install DJGPP (Free ANSI C++)

Intro

Software that is developed and distributed under so called GNU Copyleft is called GNU Software. That more or less means that it is available for free under condition that you must not resell it or sell it as a part of something else that you developed. Among many available programs C and C++ compilers are available. You can download the DOS32 version called DJGPP from several Web sites, for example from here or find some more detailed information from here.

However, if you do not want to spend some time downloading and learning how to install it yourself an installed version was prepared for you by your instructor. The good news is that it is relatively up to date version, and it contains both ANSI C and C++ with STL and a reasonable editor and compilation integrated environment. The bad news is that your instructor included also some documentation that most likely you are not going to read as a beginner to programming and some other strange languages such as Fortran, Pascal and PERL. That inflated the complete package so that it will take about 60MB of your hard drive space. The compressed installation file has about 23MB.

Installation

1. Download the file from http://gdansk.bradley.edu/download/campus/djgppr_000531.exe
   Save the file somewhere to your hard drive. You can delete it later or keep it just in case.
2. Run the file that you have just downloaded. It is a self extracting archive. It will ask you whether to unpack everything to the drive C:\ - answer yes. Do not change the default folder to anything else or you will for sure run into troubles. With some experience and more than one hard drive in your PC you could change the location from C: to something else.
3. A new folder on drive C: will be created with several sub folders its name will be DJGPP (C:\DJGPP)
4. Check if there is a folder called TEMP (C:\TEMP), if not - create one. You can use File Explorer to do that
5. From start menu select run. Then type notepad c:\autoexec.bat
6. In your autoexec.bat file add two lines at the very end:
   SET DJGPP=C:\DJGPP\DJGPP.ENV
   SET PATH=%PATH%;C:\DJGPP\BIN>
7. Save the file and exit notepad.
8. After restarting your computer it is ready to run GNU C++ programs.
9. Open a DOS window and type RHIDE.
   This is a GNU integrated environment (editor and menu driven system that runs compilers and track error messages) that is capable of running several different compilers. It looks almost exactly as old Borland C++ v. 3.0 but the supplied C++ compiler does support the newest C++ features.