The real trick is compiling all of the other image libraries SDL
depends on, using cygwin.
This is way too tricky! Please, please, if anyone has managed to do
this, please share the teh modified sources etc and binaries! I really
would like to build my project using cygwin, but SDL_Image is a problem.
Another problem is that the ming in cygwin does not have STL libraries 
Any help on that would be very nice too. I tried STLPort, couldn’t get
that work any better
There is a version of SDL_Image-devel for Visual C++ 5 but I need a
version for cygwin (mingw).You should be able to build it yourself.
If you have problems, you can try the latest CVS code:
http://www.libsdl.org/cvs/The real trick is compiling all of the other image libraries SDL
depends on, using cygwin.
– Timo Suoranta – @Timo_K_Suoranta --> From: Sam Lantinga