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

Binary vs build-from-source ?

Linux

• Using binary works great for both Debug and Release build of Slicer.

Mac

• Using binary works great for both Debug and Release build of Slicer.

Windows

Debug (32 and 64-bit) or Release (64-bit)

• You have to build Qt from source.

• Details: 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.

Release (32-bit)

• Using binary works great for 32-bit Release build of Slicer.

Download Qt: Source and Binaries

• That said, if you feel like experimenting, nothing prevent you from building against a difference version.

• The links reported in the following table allow to download either the recommended source code or binary of Qt.

	Linux		Mac		Windows
			Tiger	Leopard, SnowLeopard	VS2008		VS2010
	32bits	64bits	32bits	64bits	32bits	64bits	32bits	64bits
Qt source link	4.7.4		4.7.4	4.7.4	4.7.4		4.7.4
Qt binary link	SDK-1.1.4	SDK-1.1.4	carbon_4.7.0	cocoa_4.7.4	4.7.4	-	4.7.4	-

Qt version specific issues

Qt 4.6 on mac: hard to compile (tbd: be more specific)

Qt 4.6.x on windows (and possibly in linux/mac): No image base64 support in QLabel/QTooltips (work around exists though)

Qt 4.7 on mac: click outside of popup (http://na-mic.org/Mantis/view.php?id=1241) Fixed in Qt 4.8 ?

Qt 4.7.3 in mac: http://na-mic.org/Mantis/view.php?id=1388 (fixed in Qt 4.7.4)

Qt 4.8 does not work with PythonQt in slicer4 - suggested version is 4.7.4

How to change the minimum required version ?

• It's indeed possible to use a different version, just be aware that moving forward in time, things may not work as expected. Even worse Slicer may simply fail to compile.

• By configuring Slicer using -DSlicer_REQUIRED_QT_VERSION:STRING=4.7.0, you will be able to change the minimum required version.

• See 898bb14e, r19698, Mailing list

Build instructions

Configure options are common to all platforms.

Check our different tutorials to learn them.

Build Qt on Windows

• 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.
  • Consider installing the following optional packages (libxt-dev libxrender-dev libxrandr-dev libxinerama-dev libxcursor-dev libfontconfig-dev libglib2.0-dev)

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 -webkit
make -j8
make install

Note: On a 64 bit system, you may have to add -arch x86_64 to the Qt configure command line (?) Note: Adapt -j8 with the number of core on your machine, a dual core should probably not do more than -j3, an 8 core machine can resonably go as much as -j12.

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)