Qt5Box - a Qt5 Development Environment

[wickwire]

Hi,

I've been working with community embedded devices for a while now, especially Raspberry Pi and the Cubieboard family - Cubieboard A10, Cubieboard A20, Cubietruck.

At this point, with the help of the Qt, linux-sunxi and cubieboard communities, it's possible to cross-compile Qt 5 to these embedded devices, running A10/A20 SoC - Mali400 GPU.

Wanting to focus more on developing Qt5 apps on Embedded, rather than spend time building the environments, I've compiled all the work done and created Qt5Box.

Qt5Box attempts to be a Qt5 Development Environment, consisting of a Virtualbox OVA file which once imported to Virtualbox, results in a Virtual Machine running Ubuntu Desktop 14.04 LTS, complete with Qt Creator and Qt5 cross-compiled libraries and setups for the following targets:

• Cubieboard1 (AllWinner A10 SoC)
• Cubieboard2 (AllWinner A20 SoC)
• Cubietruck (AllWinner A20 SoC)

• All current targets have framebuffer and X11 setups included
• The VM already includes the SD Card image files to be written to microSD and used on the devices

I'm committed to adding more devices to the VM environment, even besides AllWinner SoCs, as I'm able to acquire them - but anyone with the environment is able to add their own setups or test similar boards running these SoCs.

Current Qt version is 5.3.0, the OVA file is currently stored on a Box.com online storage account and accessible upon sign up to the project - anyone can donate to help pay the storage fees, but that is completely optional, although highly appreciated.

My Cubieboard A10 broke recently, which in turn resulted in non-tested A10 support in the environment - but Cubieboard 2 and Cubietruck were tested and are working properly - which means that if anyone out there has one of these and is willing to try out the setup, please do and report back!

GStreamer (video) integration is still on-going, as well as QtWebkit (browser).

If anyone wishes to access the OVA files and try out the project, send me a valid email address for Box.com access.

Thank you!

[SGaist]

Hi,

Looks very useful ! Thanks for sharing !

[wickwire]

Hi,

Thanks, I've been doing it mainly for fun and because it was already working on Rasperry Pi, so I thought why not expand to other embedded devices.

I've been documenting everyone's efforts in this Qt5 thread I started at the Cubieforums about a year ago:

http://www.cubieforums.com/index.php/topic,173.0.html

I've also been documenting my progress on blogger:

http://wickwire2099.blogspot.pt/

I've only recently thought of searching for an embedded devices section here on qt-project, thought I could help a little - of course I only have some devices and have only worked on the ones I do own, but my objective would be to have a versatile, multi-device environment, ready for app development.

On Cubieboard, I've recently managed to obtain GStreamer video acceleration based on the noble efforts of the community in developing a working, open source solution with libvdpau sunxi.

The next step for me now is to look into QtMultimedia and be able to specify in the mediaplayer plugin which GStreamer video and audio sinks and parsers Qt should use from GStreamer and hopefully have accelerated video working with Qt.

I adapted Qt's included mkspecs for Beagleboard and turned them into Cubieboard's, perhaps those could also be included in Qt sources.

I've seen quite a few posts around this section of the forums where users own AllWinner SoC boards (A10, A20) - perhaps this solution would work for them, at the very least, just recompiling the kernel with their specific config file and using their specific fex file to manage the boot process.

The reason why I ended up using a controlled distribution environment with Box.com is because the OVA is a bit large (~16GB, and 100GB for the actual imported VM on Virtualbox) and Box.com had file size and monthtly traffic limitations which rendered distribution impossible.
I've upgraded the account and hopefully this way it will be easier to publish new versions of Qt5Box, which of course can be re-hosted and modified as desired - with the only "requirement" of getting back to the forums and discussing any issues/developments/breakthroughs.

[SGaist]

You can always try to submit your mkspecs for inclusion :)

You can also consider creating a Wiki entry here. The problem with forum post is that they tend to get "forgotten" time running by