Developing with C++ and Qt

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NOTE: This article is way to unify community experience, tips and tricks in order to develop C++ applications based on the QT framework. It's actually incomplete and may be wrong in several parts, please fix and improve!


Contents

Introduction

extracted from wikipedia:

Qt is a cross-platform application development framework, widely used for the development of GUI programs, and also used for developing non-GUI programs such as console tools and servers. Qt is most notably used in KDE, Opera, Google Earth, Skype, Qtopia, Photoshop Elements, VirtualBox and OPIE. It is produced by the Norwegian company Trolltech and developed at its Brisbane office in Australia. Nokia acquired Trolltech on January 28, 2008.

Applications using Qt should run on 2008.x, FSO/SHR, and Qtopia from Trolltech (on this firmware alternative widget toolkits, as gtk+, actually do not work, as they need an X server). This make Qt a good choice to start developing new applications for the Openmoko world.

Developing with Trolltech/Qtopia

The SDK for the new version 4.4.1 of Qtopia, formerly called QTExtended is not ready yet, tarball is available but it lacks updated documentation.

Use pre-built SDK

Trolltech provides good SDK and documentation. You can download the official SDK here.

It's a VMware based virtual machine you can run with the free vmplayer. This is a ready to go solution. What you get is an .iso image. Mount the iso. There's a readme in there. You will need to execute a script install.sh, which will generate several .vmdk files. Afterwards you need to load these into your vmplayer.

The VM is Ubuntu, and comes with a Qtopia SDK (surprise, surprise). Use krandrtray to switch to correct screen resolution. I had to install a new version of VMware to get this running, but unsure if this is really necessary. For the VMware stuff, you might need to have the kernel headers. Remember that Ubuntu calls them linux-headers. Also remember this is Ubuntu, for root access just sudo command.

Fonts were huge in my version. Use KMenu -> Settings -> Appearance and Themes -> Fonts. Click Adjust all fonts, check size, choose 7. Same with Qt Assistant, choose for the menu Edit -> Font Settings.

Manually build SDK

If you prefer to dirty your hands and to have a SDK on your host linux system, you may build your Qtopia image, and SDK manually:

TBD, actually refer to the excellent article at [1]

n.b. this methods will build applications suitable only for the Qtopia firmware

Development with Eclipse (C++ and Qt4)

If you like to develop tools with C++ and Qt4 only with the Toolchain, see Development with Eclipse

Developing with FSO based images

You have to prepare an oe build tree using the makefile at http://downloads.freesmartphone.org, read Mokomakefile article, install needed tools and type the following commands as a normal unprivileged user:

mkdir fso cd fso wget http://downloads.freesmartphone.org/Makefile make setup cd fso-unstable make create-topdir

now you have to comment the line: PREFERRED_VERSION_qt4-x11-free ?= "4.3.3" in the file openembedded/conf/distro/include/preferred-om-2008-versions.inc This is necessary to build qt 4.4.1 and to fix a problem in the oetree. FIXME, is it possible to use a local .conf file to set a correct preferred version, but how unset it definitively?

You are now ready to build Qt by typing: . setup-env bitbake qt4-x11-free

After that you'll have staging Qt arm libraries and x86 tools to build your application, so you'll have to create a somename.bb file.

A simple skeleton may be:

SECTION = "x11/libs"
PRIORITY = "optional"
HOMEPAGE = "http://yourproject.org"
LICENSE = "GPL QPL"
DEPENDS = "qt4x11"

SRC_URI = "svn://your_svn_server/some_path;module=trunk;proto=https;rev=xxx"

S = "${WORKDIR}/trunk"

inherit qt4x11

do_configure() {
${OE_QMAKE_QMAKE}
}

do_compile() {
oe_runmake
}

do_install() {
install -d ${D}${bindir}
install -m 0755 your_application_executable ${D}${bindir}
}

ALLOW_EMPTY = ""
RDEPENDS_${PN} = "qt4-x11-free"
FILES_${PN}  =  "${bindir}/your_application_executable"

This assumes you have an svn server for your sources, if not, SRC_URI has to be modified. To point a directory local to the build host you may use

SRC_URI=:///absolute_path_to/source_dir and S=${WORKDIR}/source_dir

You have to make bitbake knows about your bb file, so edit the file fso/fso-unstable/conf/local.conf and add the following line: BBFILES += "/path/to/dir_containing_somename.bb/*.bb"

You can now do: bitbake somename

If it compiles fine, you'll find in the tmp/deploy/glibc/ipk/armv4t an ipk package of your application, you may copy it to the device and install usually with opkg.

You may be able to use the FSO framework using the QT dbus module.

Developing for 2008.x

On 2008.x qt library is already shipped in /opt/Qtopia, but there is no staging files you may use to build application against it. This is in discussion, and actually you may use some workarounds.

The first is bitbaking qt4-x11-free with the official Mokomakefile, and proceed as on the FSO section, but you have to load the correct libraries with LD_LIBRARY_PATH before running your application.

The second is to use build tools in the work section of the oetree as they whould be in the staging area (TBD)

To interact with the middleware you should use Qtopia library (note not qt library), but this is undocumented/untested/unconfirmed.

Known issues

  • on Angstrom/FSO there is no support for sqlite driver, this is discussed on openembedded-devel mailinglist.
  • illume does not show QMessageBox dialogs (matchbox does), waiting for feedbacks/confirmations
  • weird painting/font-rendering on ARM platform due to definition of qreal as float, this was signaled to trolltech, waiting for feedbacks
Personal tools
NOTE: This article is way to unify community experience, tips and tricks in order to develop C++ applications based on the QT framework. It's actually incomplete and may be wrong in several parts, please fix and improve!


Introduction

extracted from wikipedia:

Qt is a cross-platform application development framework, widely used for the development of GUI programs, and also used for developing non-GUI programs such as console tools and servers. Qt is most notably used in KDE, Opera, Google Earth, Skype, Qtopia, Photoshop Elements, VirtualBox and OPIE. It is produced by the Norwegian company Trolltech and developed at its Brisbane office in Australia. Nokia acquired Trolltech on January 28, 2008.

Applications using Qt should run on 2008.x, FSO/SHR, and Qtopia from Trolltech (on this firmware alternative widget toolkits, as gtk+, actually do not work, as they need an X server). This make Qt a good choice to start developing new applications for the Openmoko world.

Developing with Trolltech/Qtopia

The SDK for the new version 4.4.1 of Qtopia, formerly called QTExtended is not ready yet, tarball is available but it lacks updated documentation.

Use pre-built SDK

Trolltech provides good SDK and documentation. You can download the official SDK here.

It's a VMware based virtual machine you can run with the free vmplayer. This is a ready to go solution. What you get is an .iso image. Mount the iso. There's a readme in there. You will need to execute a script install.sh, which will generate several .vmdk files. Afterwards you need to load these into your vmplayer.

The VM is Ubuntu, and comes with a Qtopia SDK (surprise, surprise). Use krandrtray to switch to correct screen resolution. I had to install a new version of VMware to get this running, but unsure if this is really necessary. For the VMware stuff, you might need to have the kernel headers. Remember that Ubuntu calls them linux-headers. Also remember this is Ubuntu, for root access just sudo command.

Fonts were huge in my version. Use KMenu -> Settings -> Appearance and Themes -> Fonts. Click Adjust all fonts, check size, choose 7. Same with Qt Assistant, choose for the menu Edit -> Font Settings.

Manually build SDK

If you prefer to dirty your hands and to have a SDK on your host linux system, you may build your Qtopia image, and SDK manually:

TBD, actually refer to the excellent article at [1]

n.b. this methods will build applications suitable only for the Qtopia firmware

Development with Eclipse (C++ and Qt4)

If you like to develop tools with C++ and Qt4 only with the Toolchain, see Development with Eclipse

Developing with FSO based images

You have to prepare an oe build tree using the makefile at http://downloads.freesmartphone.org, read Mokomakefile article, install needed tools and type the following commands as a normal unprivileged user:

mkdir fso cd fso wget http://downloads.freesmartphone.org/Makefile make setup cd fso-unstable make create-topdir

now you have to comment the line: PREFERRED_VERSION_qt4-x11-free ?= "4.3.3" in the file openembedded/conf/distro/include/preferred-om-2008-versions.inc This is necessary to build qt 4.4.1 and to fix a problem in the oetree. FIXME, is it possible to use a local .conf file to set a correct preferred version, but how unset it definitively?

You are now ready to build Qt by typing: . setup-env bitbake qt4-x11-free

After that you'll have staging Qt arm libraries and x86 tools to build your application, so you'll have to create a somename.bb file.

A simple skeleton may be:

SECTION = "x11/libs"
PRIORITY = "optional"
HOMEPAGE = "http://yourproject.org"
LICENSE = "GPL QPL"
DEPENDS = "qt4x11"

SRC_URI = "svn://your_svn_server/some_path;module=trunk;proto=https;rev=xxx"

S = "${WORKDIR}/trunk"

inherit qt4x11

do_configure() {
${OE_QMAKE_QMAKE}
}

do_compile() {
oe_runmake
}

do_install() {
install -d ${D}${bindir}
install -m 0755 your_application_executable ${D}${bindir}
}

ALLOW_EMPTY = ""
RDEPENDS_${PN} = "qt4-x11-free"
FILES_${PN}  =  "${bindir}/your_application_executable"

This assumes you have an svn server for your sources, if not, SRC_URI has to be modified. To point a directory local to the build host you may use

SRC_URI=:///absolute_path_to/source_dir and S=${WORKDIR}/source_dir

You have to make bitbake knows about your bb file, so edit the file fso/fso-unstable/conf/local.conf and add the following line: BBFILES += "/path/to/dir_containing_somename.bb/*.bb"

You can now do: bitbake somename

If it compiles fine, you'll find in the tmp/deploy/glibc/ipk/armv4t an ipk package of your application, you may copy it to the device and install usually with opkg.

You may be able to use the FSO framework using the QT dbus module.

Developing for 2008.x

On 2008.x qt library is already shipped in /opt/Qtopia, but there is no staging files you may use to build application against it. This is in discussion, and actually you may use some workarounds.

The first is bitbaking qt4-x11-free with the official Mokomakefile, and proceed as on the FSO section, but you have to load the correct libraries with LD_LIBRARY_PATH before running your application.

The second is to use build tools in the work section of the oetree as they whould be in the staging area (TBD)

To interact with the middleware you should use Qtopia library (note not qt library), but this is undocumented/untested/unconfirmed.

Known issues

  • on Angstrom/FSO there is no support for sqlite driver, this is discussed on openembedded-devel mailinglist.
  • illume does not show QMessageBox dialogs (matchbox does), waiting for feedbacks/confirmations
  • weird painting/font-rendering on ARM platform due to definition of qreal as float, this was signaled to trolltech, waiting for feedbacks