1 This is the README for the source archive of PuTTY, a free Win32
2 and Unix Telnet and SSH client.
4 If you want to rebuild PuTTY from source, we provide a variety of
5 Makefiles and equivalents. (If you have fetched the source from
6 Git, you'll have to generate the Makefiles yourself -- see
9 There are various compile-time directives that you can use to
10 disable or modify certain features; it may be necessary to do this
11 in some environments. They are documented in `Recipe', and in
12 comments in many of the generated Makefiles.
14 For building on Windows:
16 - windows/Makefile.vc is for command-line builds on MS Visual C++
17 systems. Change into the `windows' subdirectory and type `nmake
18 -f Makefile.vc' to build all the PuTTY binaries.
20 As of 2016, we successfully compiled PuTTY with both Visual Studio
21 7 (2003) and Visual Studio 14 (2015), so our guess is that it will
22 probably build with versions in between those as well.
24 - Inside the windows/MSVC subdirectory are MS Visual Studio project
25 files for doing GUI-based builds of the various PuTTY utilities.
26 These have been tested on Visual Studio 7 and 10.
28 You should be able to build each PuTTY utility by loading the
29 corresponding .dsp file in Visual Studio. For example,
30 MSVC/putty/putty.dsp builds PuTTY itself, MSVC/plink/plink.dsp
31 builds Plink, and so on.
33 - windows/Makefile.bor is for the Borland C compiler. Type `make -f
34 Makefile.bor' while in the `windows' subdirectory to build all
37 - windows/Makefile.cyg is for Cygwin / MinGW installations. Type
38 `make -f Makefile.cyg' while in the `windows' subdirectory to
39 build all the PuTTY binaries.
41 You'll probably need quite a recent version of the w32api package.
42 Note that by default the multiple monitor and HTML Help support are
43 excluded from the Cygwin build, since at the time of writing Cygwin
44 doesn't include the necessary headers.
46 - windows/Makefile.lcc is for lcc-win32. Type `make -f
47 Makefile.lcc' while in the `windows' subdirectory. (You will
48 probably need to specify COMPAT=-DNO_MULTIMON.)
50 - Inside the windows/DEVCPP subdirectory are Dev-C++ project
51 files for doing GUI-based builds of the various PuTTY utilities.
53 The PuTTY team actively use Makefile.vc (with VC7) and Makefile.cyg
54 (with mingw32), so we'll probably notice problems with those
55 toolchains fairly quickly. Please report any problems with the other
56 toolchains mentioned above.
60 - unix/configure is for Unix and GTK. If you don't have GTK, you
61 should still be able to build the command-line utilities (PSCP,
62 PSFTP, Plink, PuTTYgen) using this script. To use it, change into
63 the `unix' subdirectory, run `./configure' and then `make'. Or you
64 can do the same in the top-level directory (we provide a little
65 wrapper that invokes configure one level down), which is more like
66 a normal Unix source archive but doesn't do so well at keeping the
67 per-platform stuff in each platform's subdirectory; it's up to you.
69 Note that Unix PuTTY has mostly only been tested on Linux so far;
70 portability problems such as BSD-style ptys or different header file
71 requirements are expected.
73 - unix/Makefile.gtk and unix/Makefile.ux are for non-autoconfigured
74 builds. These makefiles expect you to change into the `unix'
75 subdirectory, then run `make -f Makefile.gtk' or `make -f
76 Makefile.ux' respectively. Makefile.gtk builds all the programs but
77 relies on Gtk, whereas Makefile.ux builds only the command-line
78 utilities and has no Gtk dependence.
80 - For the graphical utilities, any of Gtk+-1.2, Gtk+-2.0, and Gtk+-3.0
81 should be supported. If you have more than one installed, you can
82 manually specify which one you want by giving the option
83 '--with-gtk=N' to the configure script where N is 1, 2, or 3.
84 (The default is the newest available, of course.) In the absence
85 of any Gtk version, the configure script will automatically
86 construct a Makefile which builds only the command-line utilities;
87 you can manually create this condition by giving configure the
88 option '--without-gtk'.
90 - pterm would like to be setuid or setgid, as appropriate, to permit
91 it to write records of user logins to /var/run/utmp and
92 /var/log/wtmp. (Of course it will not use this privilege for
93 anything else, and in particular it will drop all privileges before
94 starting up complex subsystems like GTK.) By default the makefile
95 will not attempt to add privileges to the pterm executable at 'make
96 install' time, but you can ask it to do so by running configure
97 with the option '--enable-setuid=USER' or '--enable-setgid=GROUP'.
99 - The Unix Makefiles have an `install' target. Note that by default
100 it tries to install `man' pages; if you have fetched the source via
101 Git then you will need to have built these using Halibut
104 - It's also possible to build the Windows version of PuTTY to run
105 on Unix by using Winelib. To do this, change to the `windows'
106 directory and run `make -f Makefile.cyg CC=winegcc RC=wrc'.
108 All of the Makefiles are generated automatically from the file
109 `Recipe' by the Perl script `mkfiles.pl' (except for the Unix one,
110 which is generated by the `configure' script; mkfiles.pl only
111 generates the input to automake). Additions and corrections to Recipe,
112 mkfiles.pl and/or configure.ac are much more useful than additions and
113 corrections to the actual Makefiles, Makefile.am or Makefile.in.
115 The Unix `configure' script and its various requirements are generated
116 by the shell script `mkauto.sh', which requires GNU Autoconf, GNU
117 Automake, and Gtk; if you've got the source from Git rather
118 than using one of our source snapshots, you'll need to run this
119 yourself. The input file to Automake is generated by mkfiles.pl along
120 with all the rest of the makefiles, so you will need to run mkfiles.pl
123 Documentation (in various formats including Windows Help and Unix
124 `man' pages) is built from the Halibut (`.but') files in the `doc'
125 subdirectory using `doc/Makefile'. If you aren't using one of our
126 source snapshots, you'll need to do this yourself. Halibut can be
127 found at <http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/halibut/>.
129 The PuTTY home web site is
131 http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/
133 If you want to send bug reports or feature requests, please read the
134 Feedback section of the web site before doing so. Sending one-line
135 reports saying `it doesn't work' will waste your time as much as
138 See the file LICENCE for the licence conditions.