The Sun NetBeans 6 IDE is a free development environment for Java, but is available for cross platform C/C++ development as well. The NetBeans 6 download is about 12MB and unpacks to about 55MB. Sun recommends using Cygwin C/C++, GMake, and GDB debugger. With some additional effort MinGW can be used as an alternative compiler on Windows machines. Users that choose MinGW will need MSYS support. This document gives a brief overview of the installation process. For a detailed explanation visit the NetBeans and Cygwin web sites. [More…]