Experimental Qt 4.7 [Tech Preview] Packages For The Nokia N900

Thursday, 18 March 2010 07:11

Written by Apocalypso

The Qt 4.7 Tech Preview has been released a while ago, for all those cutting edge folks that want to try out the newest stuff.

The 4.7.0 TP is the first step of the 4.7 release cycle, and the main goal is to showcase newest technology (such as Qt Quick) and solicit feedback. Although the quality isn’t at production level quite yet, it should be good enough for demonstrating the new features they have in mind for 4.7 final.

The good news is that the Qt for Maemo 5 repository got a 4.7-fremantle branch that contains a relatively up to date Qt 4.7 with all Maemo 5 changes, the even better news is that we’ve updated the Debian packaging files to support the new Qt 4.7 features (namely QtDeclarative), and the best news in this already far too long sentence is that we’ve created packages for your convenience at http://chaos.troll.no/~harald/qt4-maemo5-4.7/.

To download all the *.deb packages from the page above, you can use wget:

wget --accept \*.deb -e robots=off -r -nd -np http://chaos.troll.no/~harald/qt4-maemo5-4.7/

To install Qt 4.7 into the Scratchbox based SDK (warning - this will overwrite the Qt 4.6 in /opt/qt4-maemo5):

dpkg -i *.deb

On the device, install all the *.deb packages except for the *-dev and the *-dbg ones (debug symbols on the device are useless when remote debugging).

To uninstall, run:

apt-get remove .\*qt4-maemo5.\*

Disclaimer: This is a tech preview. Please only install if you would like to contribute to Qt 4.7 for Maemo 5, or if you want to play around with the latest Qt 4.7 features, knowing that all new code might change and you might have to toss your prototypes.

The road ahead: Once the PR 1.2 release of Maemo 5 is out, the Qt 4.7 packages will replace the Qt 4.6 packages in the extras-devel repository. The stable Qt 4.6 will reside in /usr, the unstable (and optional) Qt 4.7 in /opt/qt4-maemo5.

The final 4.7.0 release is scheduled for around mid 2010, pending feedback on the new features/designs, and the overall product quality.