QT on Linux Mint 18.1 installation
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This was not a fun installation. It would have been nice to have minimum system requirements list to be able to build and execute.
I had to search internet 3 times to find the modules that were missing and had to be installed to get QT to work.
g++ and set build to point to it instead of gcc
mesa-common-dev
libglu1-mesa-devand that was just to get the demobrowser to build and run.
I hate to be negative, but I could not see any documentation that listed required modules to be able to run QT which most software groups provide and QT is greatly lacking.
If I am wrong, I am sorry and please direct me to the implicate place where this information resides.
Otherwise, this is an area you need to greatly improve. -
This was not a fun installation. It would have been nice to have minimum system requirements list to be able to build and execute.
I had to search internet 3 times to find the modules that were missing and had to be installed to get QT to work.
g++ and set build to point to it instead of gcc
mesa-common-dev
libglu1-mesa-devand that was just to get the demobrowser to build and run.
I hate to be negative, but I could not see any documentation that listed required modules to be able to run QT which most software groups provide and QT is greatly lacking.
If I am wrong, I am sorry and please direct me to the implicate place where this information resides.
Otherwise, this is an area you need to greatly improve.@jp123 Qt is a massive library. But even being huge and providing all the features it does, it is still a very easy install.
You can literally just run the online installer and it will put a binary version in a directory of your choosing. No external dependencies other than a basic development environment.
If you build from source there are definitely some external dependencies but they are quite clear in the output of
./configure
. You can even turn them on and off with the configure command.I have done it from source and binary install many many many times in linux, osx, and windows using both mingw and VS. The windows builds can be quite tricky but rarely are the linux builds tough.
It also sounds like you have some sort of issue with your dev environment as you should not need to point gcc->g++. That should happen automatically when gcc encounters cpp files unless you didn't have the g++ side installed.
From the sounds of it you didn't have a development environment set up on your system. I haven't used mint before but in gentoo it comes presetup since gentoo is a hardcore source only distribution. My new preferred linux is arch, which you have to run
pacman -Sy base-devel
before you try building things. Perhaps there is something similar in mint that you missed?I'd recommend the binary installation next time as it is standalone. Although you'll still need a development env to actually use it after it's installed. But it should take away the headache you experienced.
I've been writing Qt software for about 16 years, and professionally for the last 12, so maybe it just seems easy to me. But I've encountered a LOT harder installs in my career than Qt. With the occasional yuckiness that is source builds in windows with Qt. That can get downright ugly sometimes but it is more of a mingw problem than a Qt one.
Oh and finally, here is the document you wanted with all the requirements for each platform including linux and even embedded linux.
http://doc.qt.io/qt-5/build-sources.html
This is for source builds only, again binary should just install and work.
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This was not a fun installation. It would have been nice to have minimum system requirements list to be able to build and execute.
I had to search internet 3 times to find the modules that were missing and had to be installed to get QT to work.
g++ and set build to point to it instead of gcc
mesa-common-dev
libglu1-mesa-devand that was just to get the demobrowser to build and run.
I hate to be negative, but I could not see any documentation that listed required modules to be able to run QT which most software groups provide and QT is greatly lacking.
If I am wrong, I am sorry and please direct me to the implicate place where this information resides.
Otherwise, this is an area you need to greatly improve.@jp123 Regarding mesa-common-dev and libglu1-mesa-dev: there are many different Linux distributions and they package same software in defferent ways. It is hard to document needed packages for Qt on Linux.
For example mesa-common-dev/libglu1-mesa-dev - this are the packages you need to install on Ubuntu/Mint and probably on Debian. But that does not mean that on other distributions those packages are named in the same way.
g++ is needed as Qt is a C++ framework.
"g++ and set build to point to it instead of gcc" - never had such an issue (on Ubuntu).