[QtonPi] How to start developing Qt Apps for the RaspberryPi?

Donald Carr sirspudd at gmail.com
Sat Aug 11 01:23:24 CEST 2012


On Fri, Aug 10, 2012 at 11:08 PM, Felipe Crochik <qt-project at b2-4ac.com> wrote:
> Let me start by stating the obvious: the instructions on
> http://qt-project.org/wiki/RaspberryPi went way over my head! :(

Yes, there will be a short fall.

> Hopefully I am not the only one and either someone has already written a
> document with all the answers to my questions or someone else will benefit
> from me writing one (assuming that I will find the answers).
>
> Can we put together a "getting started" page (if there isn't one)  with the
> answer to these questions:

Certainly, please do.

> 1. How can I start without having to build Qt5?

This is currently impossible. I have built a Qt 5 package and uploaded
it, but have yet to create a package with:

1) qmake and friends (host tools)
2) qmlscene (for people who want to write pure QML apps)

I intend to do this, as soon as I possibly can. Even then, people will
still be forced to use the command line build tools and figure out the
cross compiler hijinx. This can all be put into a relatively high
level document which should aid the greenest of Qt users, but someone
has to put in the sweat to make that happen. A similar amount of sweat
might actually get Qt Creator adjusted and equipped with a target for
the Raspberry Pi.

> QtonPi have been abandoned. Few days ago there was a page explaining how to
> extract from the "image" all the tools (app-sdk, toolchain, ...) to be able
> to build qt5 apps for the raspberry using Qt Creator. Is there anything
> similar for the "wheezy"?

No, it was a several person effort, and those several people no longer
work on this.

> I would like to build my Qt5 from scratch but being able to build a few
> applications and see them running on the raspberry pi is the motivation I
> need ....

Fair enough, Qt 5 is meant to be built and be available in the repos.

> 2. Is that possible to compile qt applications on the RaspberryPi? Are there
> any packages available? I installed the qt5-snapshot but it does not include
> the "bin" folder.

This is a little tricky. Self hosting Qt 5 on the pi would be trivial,
but, and it is a doozie, I am guessing it would take about 4 days to
build it. Which is why I cross compile, which is why qmake and friends
do not feature in the package.

> 3. (Bonus) Can I get a "qml application" running by itself without LXDE? How
> can I accomplish this?

Once qmlscene is in:

./qmlscene foo.qml

assuming you are talking about qml 2

Nothing more, nothing less.

Yours sincerely,
Donald Carr


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