Random thoughts, tips & tricks about Slackware-Linux, Lego and Star Wars

Slackware 13.37 and Qt3

March 13th, 2011 by Niels Horn in

slackware_buttonA few days ago the first release candidate of 13.37 was . I updated my -current box and started testing it the same day and until now all seems fine.

I also changed to the nouveau video driver, substituting the closed-source blob from nVidia, using the mesa-7.10 library that sits in /testing for now.
Why use closed-source programs if open-source alternatives are available? :)

After updating my installation, I started to test some of my SlackBuilds and noticed that Patrick had decided to drop the kde3-compat packages only a few days earlier… This meant that some of the older programs I use, based on Qt3, would not run any longer! Personally I use QCad and CdCat that are in this category, but a quick check in SlackBuilds.org showed several others that have Qt3 as a dependency still.
OK, they are older programs, but some of them still have their value and probably other people still use them as well.
So is this a big problem? Well, not really…

My private Qt3 package

I have been using my own Qt3 package for a while, as the original version in /extra/kde3-compat was built before the change to libpng-1.4.x and libjpeg-v8* in Slackware. It was basically a simple re-build with a patch to use the newer png library. I used the original SlackBuild script from the 13.1 tree, with a little hack to include the patch.
So I thought it would be nice to submit the SlackBuild for others to build the Qt3 package as well. But there was a problem with that script…

Wizardry

Pat Volkerding's SlackBuild to build the Qt3 package contains some serious wizardry to get it to work - caused by the complexity of the Qt3 sources. The biggest problem was that it builds in /opt, not in the normal /tmp directory. This is OK if you build the package on a guaranteed clean machine or a virtual machine. But not on a box where other programs are already installed…
It took me some serious hair-pulling to understand what was going on and several failed attempts, but in the end I was able to dissect all the wizardry and build the Qt3 package in /tmp/SBo, as is the standard for packages on .

The result

SlackBuilds.org is closed for submissions at the moment, preparing for the new Slackware release, so I cannot submit the script there yet.
But if you are running the Slackware 13.37 Release Candidate yourself and want to test some of the programs that need Qt3, you can download the SlackBuild for it (or pre-built packages) from my .
For now it's the only package for Slackware 13.37 but the rest will follow after the official release ;)