Setup: Win32

Setup Win32

There are two versions of Qt available on Win32 platforms.

1. The open-source edition, which supports MinGW[6] (the Minimalist Gnu for Windows), can be downloaded and used for free with open-source projects.

   [6] http://www.mingw.org/

2. The Qt 4 Commercial Edition can be used with Microsoft compilers, such as Microsoft Visual C++ 6, and later versions of Developer's Studio.

Installing either edition is a snap: The Win32 installer guides you through the process, registers extensions, and sets environment variables for you. The open-source edition can even download and install MinGW for you.

After Qt is installed, you should click

Start -> Programs -> Qt by Trolltech -> Build debug symbols

This may take a couple of hours.

Next, open a shell window by clicking

Start -> Programs -> Qt by Trolltech -> Command Prompt

Now you can run qmake -v from the command prompt to see the currently installed version of Qt. qmake, assistant, designer, qTDemo, qtconfig, g++, and make should all be findable in your search path now.

Try the qtdemo that is also available from the Start menu.

MSYS (from MinGW) and Cygwin[7] both offer bash and xterm-like shell windows to simulate a *nix system in Win32 environments.

[7] http://www.cygwin.com

For building the Qt debug symbols, we found that the configure and make scripts did not work. However, for building our own apps, we have been able to run qmake and make inside a bash shell from Cygwin.