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2. Installation

If you have already installed EbQt, and it starts successfully, you can skip this section.

2.1 Requirements

Don't worry about this too much, since if you don't have one of the requirements, the configure script will tell you when you try to compile EbQt (unless the missing part is eb-lite, in which case you'll notice when you type eb-lite and see "command not found").

See also Problems installing EbQt.

2.2 Why are there no binary packages? (debs, rpms, Slackware tgzs, etc)

EbQt is still quite new, so new versions are released very frequently, each with many bug-fixes since the last. Any binaries at this stage would be out of date (and thus full of known bugs) as soon as they were released, since good binaries take time to prepare and test. In short, EbQt isn't quite ready for people to rely upon it for daily use yet. At some point it will be, once both it and eb-lite have become more complete and more stable.

2.3 Getting the source

The latest release of EbQt will always be at: http://people.debian.org/~cmb/ebqt/download/ (this will often be newer than the latest alpha release, but it will be reasonably stable).

Download an alpha release, which includes the eb-lite core and EbQt, from the website.

Soon, you will be able to download the developers' working copy from Subversion. Anonymous access is still TODO.

2.4 Compiling the source

Go into the new directory:

cd eb-lite

Compile and install eb-lite. This is a separate operation, and you should read the eb-lite documentation for instructions (though it's probably similar to what follows in the ebqt directory).

Go into the ebqt sub-directory:

cd ebqt

Run the configure script, which locates the required libraries etc on your system:

./configure

This will produce a lot of output, and probably a few seemingly dire warnings. As long as the last lines show that various Makefiles have been created, everything went well. The Makefiles tell make exactly how to compile EbQt on your system.

N.B. if you're running Windows, with Cygwin, you'll probably need to use the --disable-mt option to ./configure, to disable threading, as the version of Qt shipped by Cygwin doesn't appear to support it.

Now type:

make

As long as you have eb-lite running somewhere, EbQt doesn't actually require any files other than the documentation, so if you can do without the ability to click "Help" in EbQt and go straight to it (and, since you're already reading this, that's probably true) you could stop here and just copy the executable file ebqt to a convenient place. This works well if you're not root (in charge) on the machine involved, and you only want to use EbQt yourself. To install EbQt so that everyone on your machine can use it, read on.

See also Problems installing EbQt.

2.5 Installing (make install)

You will need to be the root user (in charge) on the machine to do this, since it puts files in places owned by root and accessible to all users. To become root, type:

su

and enter the root password when prompted.

Then make sure you're still in the eb-lite/ebqt directory, and type:

make install

If you get some errors containing "permission denied", you're probably not root, and you should ask whoever is in charge of the machine you're using to install EbQt for you.

See also Problems installing EbQt.


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