Preparation

There are several things that must be downloaded and installed first:

1. ActivePerl, http://www.activestate.com/Products/ActivePerl/.
2. ActiveTcl, http://www.activestate.com/Products/ActiveTcl/.
3. A set of tools bundled by The R Core Team, http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/pub/Rtools/tools.zip.
4. HTML Help Workshop, http://www.microsoft.com/office/ork/xp/appndx/appa06.htm, for compiling CHTML files.
5. MinGW, http://www.mingw.org/
6. For L^ATEX2_e documentations, MikTEX http://www.miktex.org/.
7. For building Windows installer (rw1060.exe), http://jrsoftware.org/isinfo.php.
8. The R Source file, e.g. R-1.6.0.tgz, http://cran.r-project.org.
9. Libpng, jpeg sources, http://www.libpng.org/pub/png/libpng.html, ftp://ftp.uu.net/graphics/ respectively.
10. PCRE, ftp://ftp.csx.cam.ac.uk/pub/software/programming/pcre/. (pcre-3.9.tar.gz)
11. bzip2 Sources, http://sources.redhat.com/bzip2/. (bzip2-1.0.2.tar.gz).

Some of them, such as MikTEX, are very large to download. If you are as unfortunate as me, you will be on a 56kbps modem. If that is the case, you may wish to download them, MikTEXin particular, at night when you are asleep. It will be done when you wake up the next morning - hopefully! To compile this version, R-1.6.0, you need a recent version of MinGW. You will be able to find version like MinGW-2.0.0-3.exe from MinGW's web site. It is the easiest way to get everything you need, as you will need the latest GCC (3.0.3) as well. In fact, you can probably get away with not having some of the above software installed. For example, you won't be needing MikTEX ActiveTcl if you don't need any PDF manuals and Tcl support. You don't need the HTML Help Workshop, if you don't need CHTML files. However some of these may require you to edit the MkRules (Section 4.3). If you intend on re-distribution of your compiled version, you must have everything, including Tcl support, PDF documentation, ... and so on compiled.