This is a port of the QtBase module of the Qt software development framework version 5 to the OS/2 operating system (and its derivants). This port is carefully crafted and maintained by bww bitwise works GmbH (also referred to as bitwiseworks).
The current version of the port implements all major parts of the QtBase module and is suitable to compile and run a large amount of Qt 5 applications on OS/2. It, however, carries a beta status and has the following limitations compared to versions of Qt 5 for officially supported platforms (Linux, macOS and Windows):
- OpenGL and IPv6 support is absent.
- Drag and drop support is not implemented.
- Application-defined mouse pointer shapes are not supported.
- Some aspects of the desktop integration are missing.
- Some bugs are still there.
These limitations will be addressed in future versions of the OS/2 port (except OpenGL and IPv6 which are unlikely to be supported in the near future due to limitations of OS/2 itself).
Please refer to CHANGELOG.md for a list of OS/2-specific changes from release to release.
The easiest and the only officially supported way to install Qt 5 is to use binary builds provided by bitwiseworks. This requires the RPM/YUM environment for OS/2 to be installed. Note that all recent distributions of ArcaOS already have it, so nothing needs to be done if you have one of these. In the RPM/YUM environment, there is no need to install Qt 5 libraries explicitly — it will be done automatically as long as an application that needs them is about to be installed. However, if you want to play around with Qt 5 without installing any real Qt application, the best way to do so is to install official Qt 5 example and demo applications. This can be done by issuing the following command from the command line prompt:
yum install qt5-qtbase-examples
If you have ArcaOS and prefer a GUI installer, then you should launch Arca Noae Package Manager located in the Computer > Install/Remove folder on your desktop, select YUM > Quick install.. from the main menu, type qt5-qtbase-examples in the entry field and press Enter.
Once successfully installed, all Qt 5 Base example applications may be found in the Programs > bitwiseworks Apps and Ports > Qt 5 Examples folder on your desktop.
You will find a lot of useful information about Qt 5 for OS/2 on the Wiki pages of the project's main github repository. There you may also watch the progress of our work on this port. Please read these pages carefully if you need any help or want to report a problem.
Same as above, using binary builds provided by bitwiseworks is the easiest and the only supported way. Run the following command from the command line prompt to install Qt 5 Base development packages necessary to compile and build Qt 5 programs that use the QtBase module:
yum install qt5-qtbase-devel
If you take ZIP versions of packages from bitwiseworks ZIP archives, you will have to resolve all possible dependencies yourself which is not supported and not recommended.
Once these packages are successfully installed, you may follow normal Qt instructions to build applicatoins. One thing to notice if your application uses qmake as a build system is that Qt 5's qmake installed by the above command is named qmake-qt5.exe (to avoid conflicts with qmake.exe from Qt 4). You may simply use this name instead of qmake.exe when you need to tell the build system to use Qt 5 headers and libraries.
All source code for the OS/2 port of the QtBase module is located in our github repository for this module. If you want to build the Qt 5 libraries yourself, please follow our github instructions.
bww bitwiseworks GmbH
August, 2019