How to install needed Qt packages to build kernel on 14.04?

Question

I'm going to compile kernel on Ubuntu 14.04 64-bit, so I start with installing packages that I need:

sudo apt-get install build-essential bin86 kernel-package libqt3-headers libqt3-mt-dev wget libncurses5 libncurses5-dev qt4-dev-tools libqt4-dev

Everything is installed except libqt3-headers and libqt3-mt-dev packages. For those packages I got in terminal:

E: Unable to locate package libqt3-headers
E: Unable to locate package libqt3-mt-dev

I looked around and it seems like there is no those packages in Ubuntu 14.04 repositories.

Any idea what to do?

Solution

TL;DR: Based on what you already do have installed, just install pkg-config and you should be good to go.

Building the kernel uses Qt if you want to configure what goes into your kernel by running make xconfig. (Which you likely do, as this is one of the friendliest ways to do it.)

At least for any remotely recent kernel, you can use Qt 4 instead of Qt 3. You should install:

• libqt4-dev , so the xconfig utility can link against Qt4, and
• pkg-config , so make xconfig can automatically discover the Qt4 headers installed by libqt4-dev and use them.

You can install those packages through the Software Center or with:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install libqt4-dev pkg-config

(For more information on make xconfig, see this answer to What's a simple way to recompile the kernel?.)

You don't need both Qt3 and Qt4 headers: provided either is installed correctly and the system is configured so they'll be identified by make xconfig (pkg-config is one way to faciliate this), you don't need the other.

^{By the way, though there's no harm in doing so, it's not actually necessary to explicitly install qt4-dev-tools. libqt4-dev declares the other necessary Qt4-related packages, such as libqt4-dev-bin and qt4-qmake, as dependencies, causing them to be automatically installed as well. You also only need the ncurses packages if you're going to run make menuconfig (which is a non-graphical alternative to make xconfig).}

In your case, you already have libqt4-dev installed, so you can just install pkg-config .

Comments

[s3lph]

Why do you want Qt3 headers? I assume they have been removed from Ubuntu long ago, since the current Qt version is 5.3.

[mixerowsky]

I'm trying to follow the tutorial on local Ubuntu forum, this tutorial exists since Ubuntu version 9.04 and it is regularly updated (last time is updated today for compiling kernel 3.16.1), maybe those packages remained from the older Ubuntu and it isn't changed (removed)...so I don't need those packages?

[mixerowsky]

So all packages that I need to compile latest stable kernel (3.16.1) will be installed using command that you provide?

[Gabriel Staples]

This worked to enable me to run the Buildroot make xconfig cmd to view the Qt-based GUI configuration menu.