Notes from
the Instructor

General installation help: 6:30-8:00PM Tuesday & Wednesday in Open Spaces.

Developing custom PyQt widgets and graphical interfaces efficiently.

Thanks for registering to this tutorial! I'm looking forward to meeting you in person soon. In order to get the most out of this tutorial, it is very important that you come with your laptop already set up with the following software:

• Python 2.5.x, 2.6.x or 2.7.x
• Qt 4.5.2 or later.
• sip 4.8.2 or later.
• PyQt 4.5.4 or later.
• PySide 1.1.0 or later. (optional)

Having said that, the computer I'll be using has the following versions installed. I highly recommend trying to match this configuration as much as possible:

• Python 2.7.2
• Qt 4.8.0
• sip 4.13.1
• PyQt 4.9
• PySide: 1.1.0 (optional)

The course is centered on PyQt and makes extensive use of QtDesigner and in particular PyQt's Python plugin for QtDesigner. An easy way to check whether the Python plugin is available or not is to select from QtDesigner's main menu::

Help > About Plugins > Loaded Plugins

The dialog that pops up should show the following in the list::

libpythonplugin.so

This is normally installed automatically by the Qt installer.

I have tried the course material and the installation instructions further down in this document in the following platforms:

• Mac OS X 10.7.2 (this is the one I'll be using during the demo.)
• Ubuntu 11.10
• CentOS 6.2

The instructions are centered on Unix platforms. There are some instructions for Windows, but please note that I did not validate them. The last time I installed this toolset on Windows was on an XP machine and the process really just boiled down to installing the binary distributions of those packages and I ended up with everything I needed to developer PyQt widget including the PyQt Python plugin for QtDesigner.

I will be bringing in USB thumb drives with precompiled binaries for the three platforms above. However, while I have done my best to provide a simple and convenient untar-and-go setup for the last minute installation, it is not guaranteed to work on your system. Please try setting up your machine beforehand.

Some words of advice:

• Be aware that compiling Qt and PyQt from source can take more than an hour or two depending on your hardware.

• Regardless of what operating system you use, you may want to consider using some virtualization software such as VMWare or Parallels desktop and installing one of the Linux systems mentioned above. That would increase the chances of being able to use one of the precompiled setups I'll make available.

• The instructions below work on a C-Shell. They were validated using tcsh.

Ok, without further ado here are instructions for compiling the required software directly from source.

Platform-specific Setup Instructions

• MacOS X 10.7
• Ubuntu 11.10
• CentOS 6.2

If you have any questions, feel free to contact me:

la at luisartola dot com

See you at PyCon!