This directory contains a collection of toolchain definitions for cross-compiling for Windows using MinGW on various other systems. To use these files you add a special parameter when configuring the source tree: cmake -DCMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE= . The exact file to use depends on the prefix used by the MinGW binaries on your system. You can usually see this in the /usr directory, i.e. the Ubuntu MinGW-w64 packages have /usr/x86_64-w64-mingw32 for the 64-bit compilers, so the correct invocation would be: cmake -DCMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE=CMake/x86_64-w64-mingw32.cmake . For more details see this article: http://www.paraview.org/Wiki/CMake_Cross_Compiling