Cross-compile Qt4 app for Windows on Fedora 11

Posted on December 29, 2009 by LukasT

I made school project in Qt4.5.3 and my teacher does not use Linux so I decided to try to cross-compile the project for her from Fedora 11. Here are the steps. Let’s hope it is useful for you too.

First you have to install mingw compiler, so I did something crazy like:

yum install mingw32*

That grabs everything related to mingw (installs Qt4 libs, compiler, qt-qmake specs files) on Fedora 11. Many unrelated libs are installed too (Gtk, …) – you have been warned.

Then you create Qt4 project file if you don’t have one already

qmake-qt4 -project

Pass the qmake specification:

qmake-qt4 -spec fedora-win32-cross

Run this so that QtGui is found

QMAKESPEC=fedora-win32-cross qmake-qt4 QT_LIBINFIX=4

Compile!

make

Then I found exe file in release/ directory. I wanted to distribute it so I needed to distribute some dlls too. To find out I run

i686-pc-mingw32-objdump -p prog.exe | grep dll

It lists all used dlls.I copied them from Fedora box to the same folder as the binary and I was done!

I used locate to find them (found in /usr/i686-pc-mingw32/sys-root/mingw/bin/). QtCore4.dll, QtGui4.dll and libgcc_s_sjlj-1.dll was needed for me.
I did not copied KERNEL32.dll, msvcrt.dll etc. Windows users usually have those files.

Then it worked for me. The app looked bad but worked as supposed to. In Wine it had some bug, but it worked on Windows XP.

Thanks for help to the fedora-mingw team at #fedora-mingw on freenode IRC 😉
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/MinGW/Tips – related wiki page

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6 Responses to Cross-compile Qt4 app for Windows on Fedora 11

  1. shamaz says:
    December 30, 2009 at 10:30 am

    the wine team is usually very interested in these kind of bugs (with source code and all).
    don’t hesitate to report it to http://bugs.winehq.org/

  2. DmitryK says:
    February 1, 2010 at 11:54 am

    Why the app looked bad? Doesn’t Qt uses native windows gdi?

  3. LukasT says:
    February 1, 2010 at 11:57 am

    It does. That’s why maybe it looks so lame 😀

  4. marco ferrari says:
    February 6, 2010 at 3:56 pm

    It works.
    Any suggestions to make postgres sql driver working under window ?
    I got sqldriver notfound message

  5. Framp says:
    March 8, 2010 at 1:02 am

    Nice! :)

    I’ve always used a virtual machine for this kind of stuff but it’s cool to see other ways of doing it :)

  6. elcuco says:
    April 10, 2010 at 11:32 pm

    Here is how to auto discover the needed DLLs (hope this looks ok in the comment):

    DLLS=`i686-pc-mingw32-objdump -p release/*.exe | grep dll | awk ‘{print $3}’`
    for i in $DLLS mingwm10.dll ; do
    f=/usr/i686-pc-mingw32/sys-root/mingw/bin/$i
    if [ ! -f $f ]; then continue; fi
    cp -av $f release
    done

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