Guides/Linux Installation

Initial installation of J903

For any linux distribution, the starting point is to install J903 in your home folder. To install J903 with the qtide, download the linux zip from the jsofware website and extract it to your home folder.

For the full version, start jconsole and run the following:

load'pacman'
'install'jpkg'*'

For the slim version, start jconsole and run

load'pacman'
je_update_jpacman_''
install'slim'

Before running jqt, you will need to make sure that the necessary Qt libraries are installed on your system. The required libraries are listed below for various linux distributions. Note that the instructions below specify installing the development libraries, which include the necessary runtime libraries. If you never plan to build jqt, you could just install the equivalent runtime libraries, but you won't really be saving much disk space.

The jqt binaries installed using the above commands were built on Debian 11. They will work on many but not all linux distributions and you may need to build new binaries. When all of the necessary libraries (and the correct jqt binaries) are installed, you can run jqt.sh from the J903 installation folder.

The 'install' jpkg '*' command will also place shortcuts to jqt, jconsole, and jhs on your desktop. These shortcut files may be found in the Desktop folder in your home directory. Whether they appear on your desktop depends on your system settings. You may need to enable that feature using the gnome tweak tool or other methods, enable the launcher by right clicking the desktop shortcut, or edit the content of the .desktop file. Google "desktop shortcuts" for your distribution. If you installed the slim version as above, you can generate the shortcuts by loading pacman and executing shortcut_jpacman_.

Building jqt

In order to build jqt from source, you will need to ensure that the necessary development tools (g++, make, etc.) as well as the development versions of the Qt libraries are installed.

Use git to clone the qtide source.

git clone https://github.com/jsoftware/qtide.git

Running makeall.sh in the source directory will build the full jqt binaries. To build the slim version,

export JQTSLIM=JQTSLIM

prior to running makeall.sh.

Copy the files in bin/linux-x86_64/release to the bin directory of your j903 folder, replacing the files that are there. Running jqt.sh from the j903 folder should now start the ide.

A more detailed discussion of building jqt on Linux is available at Guides/Compiling Jqt/Linux.

Distribution specific information

For all the distributions below, the most recent (LTS if available) release was installed as a development workstation in a VMware VM. In general, development packages for the Qt libraries are installed to facilitate building jqt, if desired. Note that you could also download the latest Qt sdk for linux and build the jqt binaries using those libraries. The current jqt code works fine when compiled with the Qt 5.15.2 sdk.

Debian 11/Ubuntu 20.04/Linux Mint 20.3

The instructions below should apply to the many Debian and Ubuntu-based distributions. For these distros, the jqt binaries (built on Ubuntu 20.04) available on the jsoftware website will work well.

The following Qt packages need to be installed for the full version of jqt. Only the first line is required to run the slim version; both lines are required for the full version of jqt.

sudo apt install qtbase5-dev libqt5websockets5-dev libqt5svg5-dev
sudo apt install qtwebengine5-dev qtmultimedia5-dev libqt5multimedia5-plugins

In either case, you should now have a working version of j903/qtide. Start jqt by running jqt.sh in the j903 directory.

RHEL 8.5/Alma Linux 8.5/Rocky Linux 8.5/Fedora 35

Workstation and development packages are installed. The EPEL repo needs to be available (except for Fedora).

sudo yum -y install https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/epel-release-latest-8.noarch.rpm

For RHEL 8.5, install the Qt binaries with

sudo dnf install qt5-devel.noarch
sudo dnf install qt5-qtwebengine-devel

The second package is not needed for the slim version of jqt.

For Alma, Rocky, and Fedora use

sudo dnf install qt5-qtbase-devel
sudo dnf install qt5-qtsvg-devel qt5-qtwebsockets-devel qt5-qtmultimedia-devel qt5-qtwebengine-devel

Manjaro 21.2/EndeavourOS 22

Install Qt libraries using

sudo pacman -S qt5

For the Pinebook Pro edition of Manjaro, the 64-bit RaspberryPI build of J will work well. The first command above will prompt you to "remove qt5-base"; what it means is that it'll exclude this package from the list of installed packages, which is what you want as qt5-es-base (a variant of qt5-base with OpenGL ES 2.0 support) is already installed.

OpenSUSE 15.3