Qt 4 Application and UI Framework for eCS (OS/2)

Qt is a cross-platform application and UI framework. Using Qt, you can write applications once and deploy them across many desktop and embedded operating systems without rewriting the source code. (See ​http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qt_(toolkit).) Availability for eCS means being able to port a ​large number of existing applications.

History

A few years ago netlabs.org hired Dmitriy Kuminov (aka dmik) to port version 3 of the toolkit to the eCS (OS/2) platform. This port is working well and made it possible to port many applications to our platform.

Some time ago Qt 4 got introduced. New Qt applications use this version of the toolkit, of course, but also more and more existing Qt 3 applications have been making the switch. To make sure we can port those applications again, we have to invest some more work into the eCS (OS/2) port, as Qt 4 redid a lot of things from scratch. Dmitriy offered us to work on the port again. Our goal would be to hire him for about 5 months, but we cannot do that ourself without help from the community.

Sponsoring

We do have some money in the queue but it's not enough yet. If you would like to contribute to this port, you are welcome to buy a sponsoring unit for that at Mensys. 100% of that money will be transferred to netlabs.org.

The Mensys sponsor link is: ​http://www.mensys.com/shop/NetlabsQT4

The current donation meter is available at: ​http://qt.netlabs.org/en/site/index.xml

Current Status

As of the 5th of February, 2010, the Qt framework version 4 for OS/2 is generally available! This means that the major parts of the Qt toolkit have been ported to OS/2 which makes dozens of Qt 4 applications potentially available to the OS/2 platform. Qt 4 for OS/2 is distributed in a convenient way using WarpIn packages which makes it very easy to install and use it. These packages are maintained by netlabs.org and provide a so-called official build of the Qt 4 toolkit which ensures that all Qt applications use the same set of Qt 4 runtime libraries to save system resources and improve general stability. Below you will find download links to the available packages along with their descriptions.

You may find more detailed information about the project progress and future plans on the ​Roadmap page.

If you are an end-user, there already are some ​applications available for testing.

Latest Version

The latest version is 4.7.3 released on 15.09.2011. This release brings the new functionality provided by the major Qt 4.7 update from Nokia and fixes a number of bugs. This release also includes the QtDeclarative library and the awesome QML framework.

The more detailed list of changes can be found in the CHANGES.OS2​ file.

Starting from version 4.7.3, the primary way to distribute and install official binary builds of Qt for OS/2 is RPM. This means that all Qt components are provided as RPM packages which may be installed from either the netlabs RPM repositories using the YUM command or directly using the RPM command (the GUI frontend is on the way). In order to install RPM packages on your machine, you need to install the RPM bootstrap package (once) which contains the RPM installer. The installation of RPM is described ​here in detail. Once you have RPM installed, you may issue one of following commands to install various parts of Qt:

yum install libqt4	Installs the basic Qt4 runtime needed for console Qt applications
yum install libqt4-gui	Installs the Qt4 GUI runtime needed for Qt GUI applications
yum install qt4-demos	Installs the Qt Demo application that demonstrates various Qt features
yum install qt4-devel-kit	Installs the complete Qt development environment for compiling Qt applications from sources

Note that the first two commands are not normally needed -- if you install a Qt application from the RPM repository, it will install all required Qt runtime variants automatically. These commands are only necessary if you have a Qt application distributed as a ZIP archive.

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Please note that you must remove all previous non-RPM installations of Qt, including the WarpIn ones, before installing any Qt RPM package! Otherwise, the new RPM installation may be incorrect or even fail.

If you accidentally forget to de-install the Qt WarpIn packages before installing one of the the Qt RPMs, then you will definitely get a broken RPM installation because the libqt4 package containing the core DLLs will fail to install (it will give you the corresponding message but it may scroll up before you can read it if you install something big like qt4-devel-kit). In order to recover from such a failure, do the following:

1. Remove all incorrectly installed Qt packages:

   yum remove '*qt4*'
   

2. De-install Qt 4 WPI packages with WarpIn.
3. Install the desired RPM package with yum again.

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We also provide two ZIP packages of the Qt toolkit for your convenience, if for some reason you cannot use RPM. They are described below.

Prerequisites

This is a list of prerequisites for the Qt ZIP packages. Note that if you use the RPM packages, these prerequisites, except eCUPS, will be installed automatically. eCUPS is not in RPM repositories yet so you will need to install it from WPI in either case.

GCC 4 Core Libraries	​WPI	GCC 4 runtime libraries needed for all Qt 4 installations (required).
eCUPS Installer	​WPI	eCUPS support necessary for printing to work in Qt 4 applications (optional).
OpenSSL Runtime	​ZIP	Contains OpenSSL DLLs necessary for OpenSSL support and for MySQL/PostgresSQL plugins to operate (optional).

Qt 4 ZIP Packages

Qt Runtime Libraries and Plugins	​ZIP	Qt 4 runtime necessary to run Qt 4 applications.
Qt Development Libraries and Tools	​ZIP	Qt 4 development environment necessary compile applications created using the Qt4 framework. Requires the Qt Runtime Libraries and Plugins package.
Full Qt Source Code	​ZIP	Take this if you want to build the Qt library yourself (recommended as the development environment if you regularly develop or port Qt applications).

The full Qt source code can be downloaded from the SVN repository. In order to do so you need to download and install the subversion client for eCS (OS/2) and issue the following command (<local_directory> is a directory where you want to save the sources to):

svn export http://svn.netlabs.org/repos/qt4/tags/4.7.3 <local_directory>

Alternatively, if you want to play with the latest development version, you can check out the development trunk from the SVN repository using the following command:

svn checkout http://svn.netlabs.org/repos/qt4/trunk <local_directory>

The required tools and build instructions are described in the README.OS2​ file.

The older downloads are available ​here.

Reporting Bugs

Reporting bugs and requesting new features is done through the ticket system. You can view existing tickets, add comments to them and create new tickets using the corresponding buttons at the top of every page. If you want to submit a new bug or request a feature, please use the Search function first to make sure there is no ticket for this task already created.
We review the tickets regulary and leave comments if we need more info. So please revisit the ​Feedback analysis as often as possible. If we leave comment and don't get feedback from the ticket creator, we will close the ticket after some weeks.

Anonymous access to the ticket system has been restricted due to multiple attacks of stupid spammers we've been suffering from lately. In order to create a new ticket or comment the existing one, you need to login with your Netlabs login id. If you do not have a login id, you can request one at ​http://www.netlabs.org/en/site/member/member.xml. We are sorry for inconvenience, but at the present time this is the only way to avoid extremely annoying spam.

Mailing Lists

Project discussion is done through mailing list conversations. Currently, the following mailing lists are available:

• qt-user()netlabs.org ​[http://news.gmane.org/gmane.org.netlabs.qt.user read online

This mailing list is intended to discuss the usage of the eCS (OS/2) version of the Qt Toolkit for creating or porting applications. Announces of new releases are also posted to this list.

• qt-dev()netlabs.org ​[http://news.gmane.org/gmane.org.netlabs.qt.devel read online

This mailing list is for developers of Qt for eCS (OS/2). All ticket changes are automatically posted to this list. Please don't post user questions there!

Credits

• Dmitriy Kuminov (development)
• Silvan Scherrer (management)

• netlabs.org (hosting & support)

• Nokia Corporation (original Qt library)

We also want to thank all individuals and organizations who made the donations to this project and helped to make it happen. Please go to ​this page to get the full list of sponsors.

Award

Screenshots

The downloadlink for most of the applications below is found on the ​QtApps page.

SMPlayer v. 0.6.8

SMPlayer v. 0.6.8 with SystemTray support (part of Qt beta4)

KDiff3 v. 0.9.95

mp3diags

blubbels v. 0.9

CuteGomoku

Abby 0.4.3

Simsu 1.2.1

Tubularix

QBittorrent 1.5.4