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MinGW/MSYS Vista Issues

Submitted by keath on Thu, 2008-12-11 22:46

The MinGW and MSYS environment has a couple of problems under Windows Vista:

First, the install, install-info and patch commands are flagged automatically by Vista as requiring Administrator privileges based simply on their names. Nice. This will cause mysterious permission denied errors during builds. The UAC dialog won't pop up in this case either.

The fix is to add ".manifest" files for each of these commands in the same directory as the command. The manifest file looks something like this:

install.exe.manifest:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?>
<assembly xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v1" manifestVersion="1.0">
  <assemblyIdentity version="1.0.0.0"
     processorArchitecture="X86"
     name="install.exe"
     type="win32"/>

  <!-- Identify the application security requirements. -->
  <trustInfo xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v3">
    <security>
      <requestedPrivileges>
        <requestedExecutionLevel
          level="asInvoker"
          uiAccess="false"/>
        </requestedPrivileges>
       </security>
  </trustInfo>
</assembly>

Create and edit one of these for each of the commands above. If you have Cygwin, you can copy them from /cygwin/bin.

The second problem I ran into under Vista is that tar operations on gzipped or bzip2 files will frequently fail with a "child died with signal 13" error. It appears that the MSYS versions of gzip and bzip2 have issues under Vista. I can use the Cygwin versions in their place with no problems. If you're using MSYS to build packages, be careful with having cygwin in your PATH however.

Fix for VBScript Error When Installing iTunes/Quicktime on Vista

Submitted by keath on Sun, 2007-04-08 14:55

The iTunes/QuickTime installer will fail with a "VBScript not installed" error on some installations of Vista. I'm not sure exactly what leads to this situation as it does not seem to affect all Vista users, but there is a relatively simple fix:

  • Click Start, All Programs, Accessories then right click on Command Prompt and select "Run as Administrator"
  • cd to your windows\system32 directory
  • enter the following command:

    regsvr32 vbscript.dll

This will re-register VBScript and allow the iTunes installer to run.