While I enjoy all the work I do, I do miss being closer to the machine. The average PC is ridiculously powerful these days, but your average web application can’t do much with that power.

I’ve switched my home desktop to Ubuntu recently, and loving it. But, there’s a few Windows apps I miss. What’s a developer to do? What is a developer, skilled in C++ GUI development, to do, eh? Answer me that.

The recent release of Qt4.5 and it’s accompanying licence change couldn’t have come at a better time. I had an itch to scratch, and it looked gooood. One simple install, and you have a great IDE, a GUI designer, and a stack of great classes and widgets. I was sold on the ease of integrating a WebKit browser and the fact I could build a ECMAScript based scripting engine for my app. But there’s so much more! I was a little skeptical of the smoke and mirrors behind the signals and slots paradigm, but having used it for a weekend, I’m sold.

Bottom line is that I spent more time writing my app than figuring out the framework. There’s hardly any “boilerplate” crap in each class. Once you’ve written your first signal and slot handler, you’re away. It’s all thriller, and no filler

As if that wasn’t exciting enough, recompiling for Windows and Mac is easy too. Qt doesn’t just get you closer to your machine, it gets you closer to *all* machines. Hallelujah, Flying Spaghetti Monster be praised, I’ve rediscovered a love of programming I didn’t know I’d lost.

Anyway…..

I don’t want to say too much about the app I’m writing, aside from the fact that it’s aimed at geocachers. It’s called Ammotin, and will probably get released much later in the year. I think it will be spectacular, because Qt has got me so fired up and focussing on the app, that I don’t need to worry too much about the framework.

Am I over excited?

Installation under Ubuntu 8.10 is straightforward, but I’m writing this post just to note the install steps I took. Hope it helps someone!

• Download and install the SDK, which includes an IDE
• Once installed, there’s a few packages you’ll need to ensure your first build completes:
• sudo apt-get install libfreetype6-dev libfontconfig-dev libxrender-dev libsm-dev libglib2.0-dev

Now you’re good to go!

Edit: Edvaldo in the comments noted he needed to install some additional packages as follows:

• sudo apt-get install libxext-dev libxext6-dbg x11proto-xext-dev

I started with a server install of Ubuntu, and to install VMWare server you need a desktop, a compiler, kernel headers and a few other odds and ends

Easy way to get a desktop is go the whole hog and a give a home to a Gnome…

sudo apt-get install ubuntu-desktop

Reboot and experience Ubuntu in all its brown chocolately glory. Next you need some build tools, none of this stuff comes by default, so go get it..

sudo apt-get install build-essential

The install wants inetd or xinetd, I went with xinetd…

sudo apt-get install xinetd

Now get your kernel version with uname

uname -a
Linux hostname 2.6.15-23-server ...

Use that info to fetch the kernel headers you need

sudo apt-get install linux-headers-2.6.15-23-server

I found it useful to go and symlink the headers to the place the VMWare installer expects to find them

cd /usr/src/
sudo ln -s linux-headers-2.6.15-23-server linux

Now you are ready to install VMWare Server. Grab the Linux tarball from the VMWare site, unpack it, and run the installer

sudo ./vmware-install.pl

You should be able to accept the defaults for most questions unless you have specific virtual machine networking needs. Once installed, start the VMWare console from the Applications -> System Tools menu.

Easy!