Cross-compiling a Qt win32 app on Linux

Aug

I’ve been looking for a way to compile an app developed with Qt Creator on Linux for Windows.

I came across this but I needed to tweak it before it worked so I decided to blog my own mini-guide (tested working with with Qt 4.6.3).

This assumes that you already have the Qt SDK (for Linux) installed.

The first thing to do is download and install the MinGW cross compiler
Then download the Windows version of the Qt SDK. As it’s distributed as a Win package, you’ll need to either install it on windows and copy the necessary files across to your linux distro (what I did) or install it through Wine (not sure if this even works). You can cross-compile it as well if you’re being adventurous
Place the Qt Win SDK libraries in /usr/lib32/qt4win32 and headers in /usr/include/qt4win32
Copy /usr/share/qt4/mkspecs/win32-g++/ to /usr/share/qt4/win32-x-g++/
In the above directory, replace qmake.conf with the one found here
Make sure that the paths in qmake.conf match those of your system (see NOTE below); specifically QMAKE_CXX, QMAKE_LINK, QMAKE_INCDIR, QMAKE_INCDIR_QT, QMAKE_LIBDIR_QT
Run qmake adding –spec win32-x-g++ command line arg. This should cross-compile your app.

NOTE: As my linux box is a x86_64, my /usr/lib is /usr/lib32. Please adjust this accordingly for your setup.

(2) Comments

redteam on 24 Feb 2011 at 2:52 am

This works great on Kubuntu 10.10 with Qt4.7.0 and mingw installed from the repos. Only thing I would add is that it is essential that the win32 and linux Qt’s match exactly.
matpen on 5 Nov 2011 at 2:21 am

Here (http://blog.kermat.net/blog5.php/cross-compilation-with-qt) you can find a complete tutorial to set up a cross-compilation environment with Qt. There is also a downloadable script that automates the installation. Tested with Qt 4.7.2.

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