Documentation/4.0/Developers/Build Instructions/Prerequisites/Qt

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Configure options are common to all platforms.

Check our different tutorials to learn them.

Note: download the pre-compiled Qt unless you know you need to build from source to use the Qt Designer or if you want to make a 64 bit windows build

Build Qt on Windows

• Using the Qt Designer on Windows requires that the Slicer plugins are in the same mode as Qt. If Qt was compiled in Release mode (default), Slicer would have to be compiled in Release mode as well. However if Qt is compiled in Debug mode only, Slicer has to be compiled in Debug too. When Qt is in "Release and Debug" mode only the Release version of Designer.exe is generated, Slicer would have to be compiled in Release. So for developers, the Debug mode is recommended, this is why we detail the compilation of Qt below.
  1. Use a windows extracter to unzip the [#Prerequisites|Qt zip archive], don't use cygwin unzip it.
  2. launch the msvc2008 command prompt (MSVC08->Tools->Visual Studio 2008 CommandPrompt) (or: launch cmd.exe and run vcvars32.bat) Note: Start x64 prompt from Start menu (don't start from inside visual studio or it will be an x86 32 bit shell). Menu item is "Visual Studio 2008 x64 Win64 Command Prompt"
  3. build with configure.exe -platform win32-msvc2008 -debug
     • When asked, choose open source license type (o), then accept the license (y)
     • Note: the option -prefix doesn't work on Windows.
     • Note: According to [1] Qt does not support msvc2008 on windows xp. However, running configure.exe with no -platform argument seems to work. If you run configure with the -platform argument first by mistake, and if configure -clean doesn't work, then you may need to start from a fresh extraction from the .zip archive before running configure.exe again with no -platform, unless you can run nmake with the config clean target.
     • Note: for Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 users, Qt 4.6.3 is hard to configure with MSVC2010, use Qt 4.7.x instead. Build with set QMAKESPEC=win32-msvc2010 and configure -platform win32-msvc2010 -debug
  4. run nmake
     • Note: building with webkit support requires that src/3rdparty/webkit/WebCore/tmp/moc/{debug,release}_shared/mocinclude.tmp be removed. else you will get linker errors like QNetworkReplyHandler.obj : error LNK2001: unresolved external symbol "public: virtual struct QMetaObject const * __thiscall WebCore::FormDataIODevice::metaObject(void)const (?metaObject@FormDataIODevice@WebCore@@UBEPBUQMetaObject@@XZ)
     • Note: If you encounter the following error api\qscriptextensionplugin.h(43): Error: Undefined interface,, delete the files \src\script\tmp\moc\debug_shared\mocinclude.tmp and \src\script\tmp\moc\release_shared\mocinclude.tmp and restart nmake. For more info, please see QTBug 6470].

Build Qt on Linux

• Downloading the binaries of Qt works fine with Linux, you do not have to compile Qt manually.
• Note: You need to install the libQtWebkit-devel package too.

The following descriptions are given for people who want to compile Qt anyway.

mkdir Qt
mkdir Qt-build
cd Qt
wget http://get.qt.nokia.com/qt/source/qt-everywhere-opensource-src-4.6.3.tar.gz
tar xvfz qt-everywhere-opensource-src-4.6.3.tar.gz
cd qt-everywhere-opensource-src-4.6.3
echo yes | ./configure -prefix ../../Qt-build -debug-and-release -opensource  -no-qt3support 
make -j 16
make install

Note: On a 64 bit system, you may have to add -arch x86_64 to the Qt configure command line (?)

Build Qt on Mac

Same as Linux. Use the flag -cocoa on the configure command-line(the -shared flag should be set automatically); for a 64 bit build on SnowLeopard use -arch x86_64. For more information go to http://doc.qt.nokia.com/4.6/developing-on-mac.html (warning default values are different: -carbon vs -cocoa for Qt 4.7: http://doc.qt.nokia.com/4.7/developing-on-mac.html)