Raspberry PI: A case study in deploying Qt apps to generic Linux devices

Posted by dcarr on January 19, 2012 · 13 comments

Overview

This is an awfully dry post; dry to the sheer logistic nature of it. This functionality exists and is quite straight forwards to stumble upon. This blog exists in order to draw your attention to it and hopefully minimize the stumble time.

You have a device:

1) Running an ssh server
2) With gdbserver

You also have:

1) A functional tool chain for the target (Code Sourcery is the traditional goto)
2) A Qt build for your target
3) A Linux box you are deploying from (My convenience, instructions should be readily repurposeable for Mac based developers)

Creator has various merits which basically speak for themselves.

Convenient remote visual debugging/profiling
Convenient (single click) deployment

You grow accustomed to this functionality if you target any of the officially/unofficially supported targets tightly integrated into Creator in its various distributions. (Official SDK, Necessitas, Meego SDK). It would be lovely if it were more commonly perceived as a generic end to end solution for deployment to generic Linux targets, and it is readily achievable if you avoid a couple of snags.

Initial configuration

Launch Creator
Menu -> Tools -> Options

Build & Run -> Qt Versions

Add your Raspberry PI Qt build: /opt/dev/qt-qpa-5-rasp-pi/bin/qmake

Creator indicates “Qt version 5.0.0 for Desktop”, this can be safely ignored.

Build & Run -> Tool Chains

Add your cross compiler: /opt/toolchains/arm-2010q1/bin/arm-none-linux-gnueabi-gcc

in my case. Adjust the ABI in the unlikely event it is incorrect.

Linux Devices -> Device Configurations

Add configuration with correct ssh details, deploy a public key and establish this works.

Per project configuration

1) Open an existing Qt application (example suffices)
2) Select a desktop build

Once this is done:

Projects -> Targets -> Build

Specify your target’s Qt version
Specify the toolchain from the drop down below

Projects -> Targets -> Run

Deployment

Method: Deploy to Remote Linux Host
Device Configuration: Select your “Linux Device” added in the Device Configurations step above

Run

Run Configuration: foo (on Remote Device)
Arguments: -platform eglfs

This should suffice, you should now be able to deploy, run and debug applications on the Raspberry PI (or any other similarly capable Linux based target)

A screen grab demonstrating the logistics is available here

A video where I talk through the steps is also available for those willing to weather my accent

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Qt 4 moved to open governance

Posted by Lars Knoll on January 10, 2012 · 8 comments

Since we released Qt under open governance on qt-project.org, there was always one piece missing. The Qt 4 repository was so far still handled in the old system. This was done as a simple prioritization, to get the parts of Qt that we considered most relevant for the development community out first.

The main problem has been the additional work required to integrate Qt 4 with the continuous integration (CI) system used on qt-project. Thanks to the efforts of Sergio, Rohan and others this has now been (mostly) solved. We run the full CI setup (that includes both compilation and running the test suite) on both Linux and Mac OS X for Qt 4.8. On Windows we currently only run compile tests, running the automated tests on Windows is coming soon.

You can now find the Qt 4.x repository on codereview. Pushing and reviewing changes works the same way as for Qt 5.

Approvers and Maintainers are the same as for the respective areas in Qt 5, but it should be noted that I don’t expect a lot of further development to happen in Qt 4.8. The focus here should be on bug fixes, and patches should be reviewed with this in mind.

The Qt 4.6 and 4.7 branches are not CI tested, so extreme care should be taken when submitting to these branches, and I’d like to see a review from a Maintainer for any change going in there. Changes in these branches should be limited to security issues and severe bugs that can’t be worked around in user code.

Any pending merge requests in gitorious should be resubmitted through gerrit, as we’ll close merge requests on gitorious and turn the repository there into a readonly copy.

Enjoy!

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Qt 5 – A look back at the numbers

Posted by Marius Storm-Olsen on December 22, 2011 · 15 comments

Marius Storm-Olsen is Head of Qt OSS in Nokia, and responsible for the operational side of the Qt Project. The Qt OSS team consists of 5 Sr. SW engineers who are exclusively dedicated to the Qt Project (although there are many more Nokia contributors than just those 5), and  focusing on working with the community on Qt 5 for the Desktop platforms.

This year has been full of action and excitement. We split Qt into many pieces, and called it Qt 5 in late April. We had a Contributor Summit in Munich in June and Contributor Days at both Developer Days events. We added several new modules to Qt throughout the year (12, to be exact); and we’ve moved the whole development of Qt out in the open, under Open Governance! It has truly been an amazing year when you think about it!

But, lets dig a little. How much has actually happened?

Ok, let’s first have a look at the Qt modules, and their timeline (only additions shown):

27.Apr.2011 (92351a70..): 10.Aug.2011 (59e8e791..):
  • qlalr
  • qtactiveqt
  • qtbase
  • qtdeclarative
  • qtdoc
  • qtmultimedia
  • qtphonon
  • qtqa
  • qtrepotools
  • qtscript
  • qtsvg
  • qttools
  • qttranslations
  • qtwebkit
  • qtwebkit-examples-and-demos
  • qtxmlpatterns
  • qtdocgallery
10.May.2011 (0044c57a..): 24.Aug.2011 (ae61bc2d..):
  • qtlocation
  • qtpim
  • qtconnectivity
20.May.2011 (dd45bb27..): 27.Sep.2011 (80f75f09..):
  • qtsensors
  • qtwayland
23.Jun.2011 (f7225b87..): 26.Oct.2011 (616ed77b..):
  • qtsystems
  • qtmultimedia
29.Jun.2011 (d6abcb1b..): 28.Oct.2011 (d5d07c89..):
  • qtmultimediakit
  • qtjsondb
4.Jul.2011 (1225ee9c..): 9.Dec.2011 (d64f6a90..):
  • qtfeedback
  • qt3d
14.Jul.2011 (228ee3f0..):
  • qtquick3d

You will most likely notice that QtMultimedia is added twice. That was due to QtMultimediaKit taking over for QtMultimedia, which in turn was moved into QtMultimedia again. It’s one of the pains of replacing a whole module, while at the same time ensuring that dependent modules and application don’t break during the transition.

Ok, so all these modules can make it somewhat hard to track who is doing what, and how Open Governance changed the game. So, let’s graph it up, based on the domains from where the commits came in from (merge commits ignored):

Ok, we get it, there are a lot of changes going into Qt every week, and it’s increasing. However, those nokia.com and ovi.com domains are blurring the interesting bits, so let’s drop those:

Now this looks a whole lot better. As you can see, I’ve added a couple of line markers on the X-axis:

  • Red marker: Qt 5 modularized (April 27th, week 17)
  • Green marker: Contribution summit (June 16th-18th, week 24)
  • Blue marker: Open Governance live (October 21st, week 42)

As you can see, the number of external commits coming in after the Qt Project went Open Governance just exploded! In the whole of 2011, non-Nokian contributions totaled 557 commits. It gets interesting once we graph the individual contributors though; again keeping Nokians out of the loop:

These are the Top 10 non-Nokian contributors to the Qt Project this year. And believe it or not, these guys were the authors of more than 54% of the non-Nokian commits this year! 303 commits by these guys alone! (And yes, the year is not over yet!) Thank you so much for all your hard work!

Some more numbers:

    • Commits: 8975 (non-Nokia: 557)
    • Authors: 274 (non-Nokia: 100)
    • Most diligent authors:
      • Nokia:
        • Jason M. – 535 commits
        • Rohan M. – 434 commits
        • Friedemann K. – 350 commits
      • Non-Nokia:
        • Shane K. (Accenture) – 56 commits
        • Stephen K. (KDAB) – 39 commits
        • David F. (KDE/KDAB) – 37 commits

But it’s not just pure code commits that count. We have a large team of people helping out with bug reports, wikis, reviews and general community work as well. To see that, you can just look at the member numbers in Gerrit:

Only about half of that are Nokia employees, while the rest are community members like you! Those are tremendous numbers, and apparently they just keep on growing!

So, thank you all for joining the Qt Project team; there’s power in numbers, and together we will make Qt rock! 2012 is going to be a Qt year!

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The show must go on! Qt experts are talking and showing (again)!

Posted by Vladimir Minenko on December 21, 2011 · 15 comments

It seems to be almost a tradition that shortly before Christmas, I post this message… “Qt Developer Days videos are online! Many treasures are inside”.

This year is different in many ways…

First, we used modern, broadcast grade video equipment and the content is in 720p HD format. All this means a much better video quality. We also have a new layout and storyboard flow which keeps the screen-cast video always visible.

The downside of that is that this is a lot of stuff. Despite 7TB of raw footage that we had to review and crunch in the last weeks, there are more than 60GB videos to publish. This takes time and a lot of bandwidth… Around 50% of the talks are now online and more are coming each day. We hope to finish before Christmas break.

Today, I thought I’d better post this news soon in order to make sure that your Christmas entertainment program is filled with proper content! :-)   I’m sure this does not sound too bold since we really have quite some content to be proud of! There are many very cool talks. You can access all of them in the “Qt Developer Days” -> “2011″ category in our video collection.

Some pages hosting videos contain a link to the presentation slides. If there is no link, then the slides are not available to us or we cannot not publish them for one reason or another.

If time permits us, we will add links to small size videos for downloading and watching on mobile devices. If you need an offline copy right away, please use your favorite flash video download browser plugin.

We have also got a new feedback form. You can find this link at the bottom of each video page. Please rate our video collection! Feel free to rate now! Thanks!

I’m also watching (finally! I had no time for this during the event!) and, as of now, my personal favorite is this one:

“Pimp your UI – Using effects, transitions, etc” by Johannes Zellner:

Have fun and learn more!

And most importantly: Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

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Qt VS Add-in 1.1.10 released

Posted by Jörg on December 19, 2011 · 21 comments

Together with Qt 4.8.0 we’ve released version 1.1.10 of the Qt Visual Studio Add-in.
This release contains multiple bugfixes and improvements.
The full changelog is available here.

You can get it here:
http://qt.nokia.com/downloads/visual-studio-add-in

If you find bugs, please report them in our bug tracker:
https://bugreports.qt.nokia.com/

Note: Qt VS Add-in 1.1.10 will be the last release done by Nokia.
We’re happy to announce that the project has been handed over to Digia, Qt Commercial (http://qt.digia.com/) who offers commercial support and will take over future maintenance.

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Qt 4.8.0 Released

Posted by Sinan Tanilkan on December 15, 2011

Qt has reached another important evolutionary milestone today. We are very proud to announce that Qt 4.8.0 has now been released. Many people have worked long and hard to deliver Qt 4.8.0. Today that hard work reaches final release maturity, and we are celebrating! Featuring Qt Platform Abstraction, threaded OpenGL support, multithreaded HTTP and optimized [...]

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New guides for those who are learning Qt Quick or Qt Quick Components on Symbian and N9

Posted by Vladimir Minenko on December 13, 2011

A post about new developer guides has been on the on the Qt Blog for a few weeks. We’ve made a small, but interesting update and we thought we should drop some lines about it. Just a few weeks ago we published two new developer guides. They are targeted toward those just starting out with [...]

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Qt Creator 2.4.0 released

Posted by Eike Ziller on December 13, 2011

We are happy to announce that finally Qt Creator 2.4.0 is ready to be published. I’ll summarize a few of the great amount of features and improvements in this release. You find a longer list in our change log, and you can also have a look at what we fixed for 2.4.0 in our bugtracker. [...]

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Testing QtQuick 2 on your n9/n950

Posted by dcarr on November 21, 2011

QtQuick 2 promises superior performance, a new particle system and a host of new possibilities: http://doc.qt.nokia.com/qt5/qtquick2-whatsnew.html It is also quite ripe for testing if you are into that kind of thing. This is my personally recommended approach to testing QtQuick 2 on your n9(50) at this point in time and I have to stress that [...]

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Qt Creator 2.4.0 rc released

Posted by Eike Ziller on November 16, 2011

Four weeks after we released the Qt Creator 2.4.0 beta, and almost the same time after the big news that we went open governance with the “Qt Project”, we publish the Qt Creator 2.4.0 release candidate today. If you haven’t read yet what is new in 2.4 I recommend the the beta blog post to [...]

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QtWebKit Accelerated Compositing Report

Posted by No'am Rosenthal on November 10, 2011

We’ve been doing lots of interesting stuff around accelerated compositing in QtWebKit in the last year since my last blog post, and several people have asked for information about it. So here goes a brain-dump, hope some people find it useful If you want to know more about the basics of accelerated compositing, please read [...]

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Qt 4.7.4 Release Bundle for Symbian News

Posted by Aleksi Uotila on November 8, 2011

Today we are making available the Qt 4.7.4 release bundle for all Symbian^3, Symbian Anna, and Symbian Belle devices. The Qt SDK 1.1.4 update has the necessary Symbian Anna and Belle build targets available allowing application development for Qt 4.7.4. Nokia Store deployments are also possible. This is a big release for Qt developers. In this [...]

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