QtCreator on Rebecca

Rebecca is the code name for the Linux Mint 17.1 distribution. I just upgraded my linux box and decided to try the Mint Mate edition. I chose the Mate edition mainly because the Mate desktop seems to be less demanding for CPU (I’m only running a modest Intel Atom CPU 330 @ 1.60GHz).

I have to admit that I was positively surprised with the user experience. In the past I have used several different Linux distributions and it seemed that they always had some issues that made the usage less than optimal. I think this is the first distribution at least for me which just works exactly as expected. Seems the Mint team has done an excellent job here.

So far I have been running QtCreator on my windows PC only. Maybe I could  try to install QtCreator on my Mint box too and see how it works there.

The offline installation package can be downloaded from

https://n9.dy.fi/2015/08/install-qtsdk-1-2-1-with-the-offline-installer/

Qt Creator needs a C++ compiler so if that is not yet available we can install the Gnu C++ compiler.

$ sudo apt install g++

After unpacking and setting the permissions the installer can be launched with sudo.

$ unzip QtSdk-offline-linux-x86_64-v1.2.1.zip
$ chmod 755 QtSdk-offline-linux-x86_64-v1.2.1.run 
$ sudo ./QtSdk-offline-linux-x86_64-v1.2.1.run

01-Qt-SDK-Setup

Ok, let’s proceed and specify the installation folder. I will select the Custom installation so that I can match the installation with the windows QtCreator.

02-Qt-SDK-Setup

I will select the Harmattan support (and drop Symbian).

03-Qt-SDK-Setup

Accept the license agreement and proceed.

04-Qt-SDK-Setup

And install.

05-Qt-SDK-Setup

Time to grab a cup of coffee…

06-Qt-SDK-Setup

After the installation has finished the QtCreator can be started. However, the folder ownership for the configuration folders should be updated, e.g.

$ sudo chown -R n9dyfi:n9dyfi $HOME/.local
$ sudo chown -R n9dyfi:n9dyfi $HOME/.config

In addition, you may need to install the required version for the JPEG library:

$ sudo apt-get install libjpeg62

07-Qt-SDK-Setup

Let’s launch QtCreator and let’s open TestApp10 from GitHub. Will it run out of the box on linux?

08-Qt-SDK-Setup

Looks like the project opens just fine. And even the simulator seems to work just like on windows. I really like this “it just works” experience. 🙂

As shown below I also managed to install Gimp with the additional theme package from rgb4u (Gimp can be downloaded with the Linux Mint Software Manager tool).

11-Qt SDK Setup

The Mint application menu was also updated during the installation and all the QtCreator tools are available there:

11-Qt-SDK-Setup

My conclusion for QtCreator/Rebecca: highly recommended!

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