Software/Geant4/Installation/Qt

Introduction

Qt "is a cross-platform application framework that is widely used for developing application software that can be run on various software and hardware platforms with little or no change in the underlying codebase, while still being a native application with the capabilities and speed thereof".

For Geant4, the Qt headers and libraries are required in order to allow visualisation and interaction through the Qt user interface.

Details

Website

http://qt-project.org

Source URL

http://download.qt.io/official_releases/qt/5.6/5.6.0/submodules/

Installed version

5.6.0 (13 May 2016)

Source code

src/geant4-prerequisites/qt/qtbase-opensource-src-5.6.0.tar.gz

Installation Notes

Geant4 supports Qt 4.6 or higher (Qt 4.8 or higher on Mac).

Qt is available in a number of different versions and with a vast array of submodules. Only the "qtbase" submodule is required to compile all the elements required for Geant4. The various different installer and source code options can be found at: http://www.qt.io/download-open-source/

For installation, Qt does not support installation into a sandbox directory (i.e. there are no options prefix or DESTDIR defined for command make install) and must be given the installation directory with the -prefix option. As such, to recompile Qt for different target directories, the configure script must be rerun with a modified -prefix /path/to/dest option. This has to be managed manually as can be seen in the installation commands below.

The tarball extracts to a rather long folder name. To follow the installation commands below, rename this to src/qt-5.6.0.

Some instructions on the correct package to download and the various compilation flags were provided by Ben Morgan at Warwick, along with this configuration script:

https://github.com/SuperNEMO-DBD/homebrew-cadfael/blob/master/Formula/qt5-base.rb

Installation

When downloading software, the downloaded tarball (or other Zip archive) should be placed in an appropriately named directory in /unix/pbt/software/src: the instructions below assume that the directory is /unix/pbt/software/src/qt.

The source code should then be extracted into a suitable subdirectory in /unix/pbt/software/build. The extracted source code directory can only be deleted once the software has been built and installed

Source Code Extraction

cd /unix/pbt/software/src/geant4-prerequisites/qt
tar -xvz -f qtbase-opensource-src-5.6.0.tar.gz
mv qtbase-opensource-src-5.6.0 qt-5.6.0

Build And Install

These instructions assume the code has already been built for the Development environment before building for the Production environment, so some of the commands for the Production install are omitted. Although it is highly discouraged to install straight to the Production environment without first compiling a Development version, it is possible to do so by adding in the directory creation commands at the start.

Development Environment

cd /unix/pbt/software/build
mkdir -pv qt/qt-5.6.0
cd qt/qt-5.6.0
../../../src/geant4-prerequisites/qt/qt-5.6.0/configure -prefix /unix/pbt/software/dev/qt-5.6.0 -release -opensource -confirm-licence -nomake tests -nomake examples -optimized-qmake -opengl -qt-xcb
make
make install

Production Environment

cd /unix/pbt/software/build/qt/qt-5.6.0
../../../src/geant4-prerequisites/qt/qt-5.6.0/configure -prefix /unix/pbt/software/prod-sl6 -release -opensource -confirm-licence -nomake tests -nomake examples -optimized-qmake -opengl -qt-xcb
make
make install