QtiPlot - Installation Notes

License:

QtiPlot is distributed under the GNU General Public License. Thus it is "free software". "Free software" is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of "free" as in "free speech", not as in "free beer". "Free software" is also often called Open Source, FOSS, or FLOSS.

Free software is a matter of the users' freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software. More precisely, it refers to four kinds of freedom, for the users of the software:
  • The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0).
  • The freedom to study how the program works, and adapt it to your needs (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
  • The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2).
  • The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits (freedom 3). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

General requirements:

For QtiPlot, you need to install the following libraries: Qt (>=4.2), QwtPlot3D, Qwt (5.0.2), GSL, muParser (1.28), and zlib.
QwtPlot3D and Qwt must be compiled against Qt >= 4.2!
The QtiPlot developers also work very actively on the liborigin library. The development version of this library is shipped with QtiPlot in the "3rdparty" folder and does not need to be compiled or installed separately.
In order to build QtiPlot you also need qmake, which is distributed as a part of Qt.

Linux/Mac OS X:

Binaries from maintenance contracts:

Ion Vasilief offers supported QtiPlot binaries as Debian packages (for Debian, Ubuntu, ...) and RPM packages (for RedHat, Mandrake, SuSE, Fedora, ...) as well as for Mac OS X 10.4. (The RPM packages are created on Ubuntu.)
To use this service, you need to subscribe to a maintenance contract. You can find details about this here: QtiPlot download page.
To install the Debian package, download the file qtiplot_X.X.X_i386.deb and login to your machine as "root" (on Ubuntu, login as a normal user and prepend sudo), then open a terminal and execute the following command:
dpkg -i qtiplot_X.X.X_i386.deb
To install the RPM package, download the file qtiplot-X.X.X-1.i386.rpm and login to your machine as "root", then execute:
rpm -i qtiplot-X.X.X-1.i386.rpm
To install the binary package on Mac OS X 10.4, download the file qtiplot-X.X.X.pkg.zip, unzip it, double-click on the "qtiplot-X.X.X.pkg" file and follow the installation instructions. The package provides all needed libraries, except Python 2.5, which must be installed separately on your system.

QtiPlot Linux binaries free of charge:

The QtiPlot team offers GNU/Linux binaries free of charge but without any guaranteed support. Some time after each release, you will find these (including notes how to install them) on the QtiPlot download page or in the files section at the QtiPlot project page at berliOS.

Compiling QtiPlot from source:

  1. Install Qt (>=4.2), GSL and zlib; either from your package manager or from the sources. If you are using precompiled packages, make sure you also install the corresponding development packages (*-dev or *-devel). If you want to display the manual from within QtiPlot (you can also view it with your favorite browser), you also need the Qt Assistant, which sometimes comes in a separate package (qt4-dev-tools for Ubuntu edgy).
  2. Open a terminal window.
  3. Download the .tar.bz2 archive with QtiPlot's sources (or the .zip archive, which has the same contents):
    wget http://soft.proindependent.com/src/qtiplot-X.X.X.tar.bz2
  4. Unpack the source archive: tar -xvjf qtiplot-X.X.X.tar.bz2 (or unzip qtiplot-X.X.X.zip, respectively)
  5. Get Qwt (>=5.0.0) sources and unpack them to the 3rdparty folder:
    cd qtiplot-X.X.X/3rdparty
    tar -xvjf /path/to/qwt-Y.Y.Y.tar.bz2
  6. Rename the new directory to qwt:
    mv qwt-Y.Y.Y qwt
  7. We want to build the static version of Qwt in order to avoid potential conflicts with an already installed version. Open the file qwt/qwtconfig.pri and comment out the line
    CONFIG += QwtDll
  8. Build Qwt:
    cd qwt; qmake && make; cd ..
  9. Get QwtPlot3D sources and also unpack them to qtiplot-X.X.X/3rdparty:
    tar -xvzf qwtplot3d-Z.Z.Z.tgz
  10. We also want to build a static version here, so open qwtplot3d/qwtplot3d.pro in your favorite text editor and add the line
    CONFIG += staticlib
    at a convenient place (say, below the other CONFIG line).
  11. Build qwtplot3d:
    cd qwtplot3d; qmake && make; cd ..
  12. Go to the directory qtiplot-X.X.X/qtiplot:
    cd ../qtiplot
  13. We don't want to build GSL ourselves, but rather use the system-wide installation. To do this, open qtiplot.pro in your favorite editor and uncomment/comment the corresponding lines in the "Linux (Mac OS X)" section.
  14. Near the head of the same file, either comment out the line SCRIPTING_LANGS += Python or make sure you have the following additional dependencies installed: Python 2.5, SIP 4.5.2 or 4.6, PyQt 4.2. Other versions as those indicated above may or may not work. Specifically, there are known issues with a number of SIP versions and a given version of PyQt will only work with a limited range of SIP versions.
  15. Build qtiplot:
    qmake && make
  16. You should now be able to run QtiPlot by entering
    ./qtiplot
  17. Install QtiPlot on your system (you need root priviliges):
    sudo make install
    or, alternatively,
    su -c "make install"

Windows:

Binaries from maintenance contracts:

Ion Vasilief offers supported QtiPlot Windows binaries. In principle QtiPlot should work on any Windows version from 98 to Vista. But don't expect it to run perfectly on older versions than 2000. For platform specific issues of Qt4 based applications see doc.trolltech.com.
To install:
  1. Download the qtiplot-X.X.X.exe file.
  2. Open a Windows Explorer, double click on 'qtiplot-X.X.X.exe' and follow the installation instructions.

Compiling QtiPlot from source:

If you want to compile the application from source, you need to install the Qt/Windows Open Source Edition 4.2. and use MinGW as a compiler.

The compilation of QtiPlot from sources requires the following steps:
  1. Install or compile the required libraries listed above.
  2. Download the qtiplot archive (qtiplot-X.X.X.zip) and unzip it.
  3. Modify the 'qtiplot/qtiplot.pro' file with a text editor in order to set the INCLUDEPATH variables to the header files ('include' directory) of your local build of the libraries listed above. E.g. INCLUDEPATH += ../3rdparty/qwtplot3d/include if you put QwtPlot3D into the "3rdparty" directory.
    Remark: Lines stating with # are comments and thus ignored by qmake.
  4. Modify the 'qtiplot/qtiplot.pro' file to set the LIBS variables (those prefixed win32: only) to the actual directories of your library builds. E.g. win32:LIBS += ../3rdparty/qwtplot3d/lib/libqwtplot3d.a if you put QwtPlot3D (as a static library) into the "3rdparty" directory.
  5. Open a command prompt, go to the 'qtiplot-X.X.X\qtiplot' folder (cd X:\path\to\qtiplot\qtiplot-X.X.X\qtiplot) and execute
    qmake qtiplot.pro.
  6. Finally type mingw32-make and wait until it finishes building qtiplot.exe.

Forums and mailing lists:

If you want to discuss QtiPlot with other users (or the developers) or if you are insterested in its further development, you can go to the relevant QtiPlot forum or subscribe to the appropriate QtiPlot mailing list.