2nd Update Nov 14th 2011: Having problems compiling qt-creator.  Hopefully today, maybe tomorrow.

I’ve finished the first compile of Qt 4.7.4 packages for RHEL/Centos 6.0.  There are several things to consider before using these packages.

Unlike RHEL/Centos 5, Qt 4 is a primary system package upon which rests a host of system applications, most notably KDE.  For this first round of packages, I took the system package spec file and updated it with the 4.7.4 sources.  There are quite a few patches in the system sources, and I kept all of them that didn’t cause a portion of the build process to break.  Anything that broke the process was simply commented out, which is a lazy way of doing things.  In actuality, each one should be analyzed and re-patched to the new source if necessary.  Time constraints dictate that I’m a bit lazy on this for now, so these packages should be rigorously tested before pushed to a production system.  Also, the new system packages use an Epoch, which means that the version numbers are meaningless in terms of which packages Yum will install.  To get around this, I bumped the Epoch from 1 to 1000, and I’ll continue to increment it as I push new packages.  This should provide that the freivald.com packages are always selected over other repositories.

I plan to push these to a fresh VM in a day or two and, if all goes well, build and push Qt-Creator.

Feel free to test these packages, but be aware that they are for test purposes only at this point.  Please provide feedback on the success or failure of your testing.

The repository file (which is the same as the v5 file) is located here.

Cheers.

–JATF

I’m very pleased that so many people find the Qt for Centos and RedHat Enterprise Linux packages and the Centos images for the Alix platform useful.

Cheers.

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

If anyone has problems with the new registration screen, e-mail me at: joseph@freivald.com.

–JATF