Getting started with the Boost libraries in Cygwin
This post assumes that the boost libraries have been downloaded and extracted to the directory of your choice. See this previous posting for more details on how to download and extract the Boost libraries. Open Cygwin and cd to the location where your Boost libraries have been installed. For Windows directories with white spaces please enclose it in quotes, eg: $ cd "C:\Program Files\boost_1_46_1" Check to see that the boost/ folder lives at this location using $ ls : If so, run the bootstrap: $ ./bootstrap.sh –prefix=boost/ Then run the bjam executable (takes a while) $ ./bjam And run bjam installer (takes a very long while): $ ./bjam install After this has completed you will find that within the boost/ folder, three other folders have been created, namely bin , include and lib . Recursively copy these 3 folders to the /usr/local/ destination: $ cp -r boost/bin /usr/local/ $ cp -r boost/include /usr/local/ $ cp -r boost/lib /usr/local/ ...