With this release comes a new repository structure. The old /centos tree will disappear except for the new software.freivald.com repository file update, which point to the new repository. The new files are found only at http://software.freivald.com/el. The upgrade should be seamless, but will require one ‘yum update’ to grab the new repository files, and another ‘yum update’ to grab the updated files out of the new repository.

If you use priorities, which you should if you have more than one additional repository, be certain to un-comment the priority lines in /etc/yum.repos.d/software.freivald.com.repo.

The new repository file is at http://software.freivald.com/el/5/i386/os/software.freivald.com-2.0.0-0.el.noarch.rpm

Please let me know of any problems with the update, particularly on x86_64. I have changed the way the qt-creator libraries are linked because the qt-creator source always puts the libs in /usr/lib/qtcreator, even when they should be in /usr/lib64/qtcreator.

Cheers.

–JATF

A lot has been happening in the mean time! Centos 6 is here! Plus we’ve got an update to Centos 5, not to mention several iterations of Qt. So I have my work cut out for me!

Here is what I plan to do. First, the existing yum tree for software.freivald.com really kind of sucks. I’m going to set up a new tree that compartmentalizes things better. Then I’ll push an update to the software.freivald.com-repo package that will point to the new repository. That way, everyone should have a quick, easy migration to the new tree without having to do anything but your standard ‘yum update’.

The new tree will be renamed to el5 instead of centos because we have a lot of RHEL users as well, and I don’t want them to feel left out. It will also support multiple versions of the OS, from the current supported releases all the way through 6, in one tree. This should make it easy for users to find stuff, and minimize my work load to support all of the platforms in the long-term.

As for you loyal ALIX users, part of generating the new repository will involve setting up new virtual machines for each supported version. During that process I plan to set up the new Alix images, both for Centos 5 and 6. I’ll make improvements to the images based on the comments that I’ve received, and then push them to the web. As you already know, image updates are a manual process.

Once that’s all done, I plan to find a better content management system and change from a wordpress blog into more of a kind of support-site type thingy so that Qt users don’t have to wade through ALIX stuff, so that I can add new items without causing the old ones to scroll of the screen, and so that I can maintain static link addresses for various types of stuff (i.e: joseph.freivald.com/qt would always go to the Qt page, etc.), which will help your favorite search engine find stuff easier. I would appreciate suggestions here, as I find web-based stuff tedious and annoying. In fact, if someone wanted to give back some time to me and help me get a new site configured, I would be really, really appreciative.

Well that’s pretty much it. If anyone is stopping by the Offutt Airforce Base Air-Show on Saturday, stop by the US Coast Guard Academy booth and see me!

Cheers.

–JATF

Qt update is to new version.

Qt Creator update adds a menu item. Thanks nina802 for the suggestion.

Check here for instructions.

Cheers.

–JATF

When Centos 6 is released I’ll be building Qt packages and ALIX images for it but I will not be abandoning el5 until it is EOL. Lord thank you for Virtual Machines!

I will also be re-configuring the repositories to make them non-centos specific.  I’ll be using ‘qt-el’ instead of ‘centos’ to eliminate confusion for RHEL users who have never heard of Centos. The update will involve moving the RPM packages to a new directory structure and updating the repository package.  The old /centos directories will have only the updated repository package in it, so when a ‘yum upgrade’ is performed on an existing machine the new package will redirect the machine to the new directory structure.  A second  ‘yum update’ will then upgrade the packages normally.

With any luck it will be entirely seamless to the community.

On a side note, we’re over 200 registered users, over 700,000 non-bot hits per month (over 670k from Yum and wget alone!), and easily keeping over 50GB of transfer per month, with a peak in October of over 110GB.  We’re #1 on Google’s search with “Qt Centos” and “ALIX Centos” and several others.  We have users in Russia, Germany, Italy, France, India, South Africa, the U.S., and dozens more, with hits coming from .com, .edu, .org and several other top-level domains.

Thank you to everyone for making this project worthwhile.

–JATF

UPDATE [6 OCT, 11:34]: This morning I finally added Yum groups to the repository, so all you have to do for the base library is (as root):
yum groupinstall Qt4
and for the development environment:
yum groupinstall Qt4-Devel
The mysql and postgresql packages do not install by default because they pull a bunch of extra libraries if you don’t have the databases already installed, so you might also want to include:
yum install qt4-postgresql qt4-mysql

If you are doing any application debugging you may want to install qt4-debuginfo as well:
yum install --enablerepo software.freivald.com-debuginfo qt4-debuginfo

NOTE: I’ve changed the 32 bit packages to be optimized for i686, which might register conflicts against the old i386 packages. If that happens, uninstall the conflicting i386 packages using ‘rpm -e –nodeps ‘, which will keep dependencies from preventing the uninstall. Then install the new packages as normal.

If this causes too much headache then I can create a separate repository for each. Let me know.

These packges were created on Centos 5.5 but should be completely compatible with RedHat Enterprise Linux 5.5.

–JATF

To install, as root, type:

rpm -ivh http://software.freivald.com/centos/software.freivald.com-1.0.0-1.noarch.rpm
yum update fontconfig fontconfig-devel qt4 qt4-devel qt4-doc qt4-postgresql qt4-odbc qt4-sqlite qt-creator

Also, I’ve updated the qt-creator package to 1.3.1-1.  The issue with the package was that on the 64-bit environment, qt-creator continues to look into /usr/lib/qtcreator for it’s plugins instead of /usr/lib64/qtcreator.  I added a link from /usr/lib/qtcreator to /usr/lib64/qtcreator in the x86_64 arch build.  This means that you should not install the 32-bit version and the 64 bit version on the same machine – but I’m not sure that was ever a good idea in the first place.

Please post here if you have any issues with the Qt 4.6.3 build or the qtcreator 1.3.1-1.

I’ve also posted the public key that I use to sign the packages here.  To use it, as root, type:

rpm --import http://software.freivald.com/centos/RPM-GPG-KEY-software.freivald.com

NOTE: If you use yum-priorities you will need to set this repository to the same level as ‘core’ for these to install properly.  You’ll know if you have a priorities issue because ‘yum install qt-creator’ will scream at you that you are missing libaries.  These libraries come in the version that I compile but not in the Centos core distribution and if the priorities are wrong it will pull those packages from core.

Cheers.

The Qt4 packages for Centos are updated to 4.6.2 and Qt Creator is updated to 1.3.1.

To install:

rpm -ivh http://software.freivald.com/el/5/i386/os/software.freivald.com-2.0.0-0.el.noarch.rpm

yum update fontconfig fontconfig-devel qt4 qt4-devel qt4-doc qt4-postgresql qt4-odbc qt4-sqlite qt-creator

Verify that the versions are coming from software.freivald.com and enjoy.

UPDATE: Nokia released Qt 4.6.0 and qt-creator 1.3.0 today.  The new RPMs are compiled and stored in the repository.  ‘yum update’ should be sufficient to grab the new ones.  I also changed the directory to reflect Centos 5.4 instead of 5.3.  Let me know of any issues.

–JATF

Want to get the Qt SDK working on Centos 5.3?

Quick instructions:

rpm -ivh http://software.freivald.com/centos/software.freivald.com-1.0.0-1.noarch.rpm

yum update fontconfig fontconfig-devel qt4 qt4-devel qt4-doc qt4-postgresql qt4-odbc qt4-sqlite qt-creator

Verify that the versions are coming from software.freivald.com and install.

Longer story:

All of the RPM’s described in this post are in a yum repository that you can access by installing this RPM.  It includes both x86_64 and i386 repositories that are automatically selected based on your architecture.

The first problem: the FcFreeTypeQueryFace problem that is very well described here, with a manual compile and upgrade way around it.  I thought I would go one step further and create an RPM.  Here is what I did:

I started with this source file from fontconfig.org and this SRPM from redhat.com, modified the spec file from the SRPM because of a changed config file location, and created these RPM files for you to install.

The second problem:  the QtSDK is built against several other libraries that are newer than provided with CentOS 5.3.  Rather than update those libraries, I’ve opted to compile RPMs for qt4 and qt-creator for CentOS 5.3. There are all new packages for them in the repository. They upgrade the shipped version (4.2.1) to the new version. They should be binary compatible, since theoretically Qt only breaks binary backwards compatibility on a major revision number change, but I don’t have any real way to test this. Feel free to post any problems you encounter.

The third problem: qt-creator isn’t included with the qt4 source.  I created it as its own package.  ‘yum install qt-creator’ to install it by itself.

Hopefully after installing the repository package, a

yum update

and everything should ‘just work’.

Oh, and feel free to use the ‘joewidgets’ and ‘joewidgets-devel’ packages.  They include some widgets that I use for other projects, primarily a back-port of the KLed widget to QLed that removed KDE dependancies, and a multi-state button with configurable colors for each state.  The ‘devel’ package includes designer plugins that also work in qt-creator.  Source for those are published in the srpms directory.

–JATF