Opensource Electrum builds for Windows (using Linux!)

slush (OP)

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Opensource Electrum builds for Windows (using Linux!)

December 08, 2012, 03:31:08 PM
Last edit: December 10, 2012, 12:38:54 AM by slush

#1

Hi all,

I spent last night by preparing Windows build process for Electrum client.

The goal for the future is to create deterministic Electrum builds, so anybody will be able to compile Electrum on his own and check that official binaries from website don't contain any malware. Currently the process is not fully deterministic yet (filesize is the same, but file contains parts in random order so it has different md5sum), but I'm pretty sure it can be solved sometimes.

Another goal of this project is that now you can create Electrum binaries even without having Windows installed, because build scripts are using Wine on Linux!

Build script isn't patching Electrum in any way. The goal is to create trusted build process, not optimize Electrum for Windows users. Please ask ThomasV for any Windows-related feature for the client.

Compiled binaries of Electrum for Windows:
Single executable, compressed file: http://mining.bitcoin.cz/media/download/electrum-1.5.6-min.exe
ZIP archive, uncompressed files: http://mining.bitcoin.cz/media/download/electrum-1.5.6.zip

How to compile Electrum on my own?
1. Builds were tested on more machines with Ubuntu 12.04 LTS and 12.10
2. Install Wine 1.4 (default in 12.04) or 1.5+ (don't use Wine 1.4.1 included in 12.10, there's issue with MSI installer; use wine PPA instead).
~~3. Download http://mining.bitcoin.cz/media/download/electrum-wine.tgz~~
3. Build scripts are already in Electrum git repository.
4. Copy /contrib/build-wine from git to / (yes, really, put it into the root; final binaries contains some paths, so extracting files to another location will affect final EXE!).
5. Run "./build-wine.sh", it will download all dependencies. When you'll be asked, always leave default settings and press "Next >"
6. Build will create two separate versions in dist/ directory. One is "dist/electrum.exe", standalone compressed executable. Second one is directory "dist/electrum" containing uncompressed binaries, useful for comparsion with other builds.
7. If you want to rebuild new version of Electrum, just change path to ZIP file in "build-wine.sh" and re-run script with "./build-wine.sh update". It will skip downloading all dependencies.

Nightly builds for Windows (EXE)
Visit http://electrum.bitcoin.cz/ to get nightly builds from Electrum's Git every day at 00:30 UTC.