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, GSL, Qwt (>=5.0.0) and zlib. QwtPlot3D and Qwt must be compiled against Qt 4.2! If these are compiled with Qt3 the application will crash!
This version of QtiPlot uses a modified version of liborigin which is supplied in the "3rdparty" folder. It is already included in the qtiplot/qtiplot.pro file and does not need to be compiled or installed separately.
The latest version of muParser (1.28 not officially released yet) is also included in "3rdparty/muParser", so you don't need to download and install it.
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 for several distributions 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. open a terminal window
  2. download the .tar.bz2 archive (or the .zip archive, which has the same contents):
    wget http://soft.proindependent.com/src/qtiplot-X.X.X.tar.bz2
  3. unpack the source archive:
    tar -xvjf qtiplot-X.X.X.tar.bz2 and unzip qtiplot-X.X.X.zip respectively
  4. go to the main folder of the decompressed archive:
    cd qtiplot-X.X.X
  5. open the file 'qtiplot/qtiplot.pro' in you favorite text editor and adjust the INCLUDEPATH and LIBS variables to point to the locations of the required libraries on your system (INCLUDEPATH is for header files and LIBS for the libraries).
    This can look like this if you want to statically link against Qwt3D:
    unix:LIBS += /path/to/qwtplot3d/lib/libqwtplot3d.a
    and like this if you want to link dynamically:
    unix:LIBS += -L /path/to/qwtplot3d/lib -lqwtplot3d
    For system-wide installed libraries (e.g. by your package manager) you can omit the "-L" parameter:
    unix:LIBS += -lqwtplot3d
    Remark: Lines stating with # are comments and thus ignored by qmake.
  6. run qmake
  7. run make
  8. login as root and run make install
    or simply su -c "make install"
If you want Python scripting support (uncomment the line SCRIPTING_LANGS += Python in qtiplot/qtiplot.pro before running qmake), you will also need to download and install Python 2.5, SIP 4.6 and PyQt 4.2. All three of them are included in many Linux distributions. 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.

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.