Installation

edfEdit is a program that has been built using Qt 3.2 (libqt-mt on a Suse Linux system). So, to compile it, you will need to have this library installed. And you should know where it is located (in my system it is installed at /usr/lib/qt3)

First of all you have to download the sources. They can be downloaded in two different forms

• As a source: edfEdit-1.0.tar.gz
• As a pre-compiled auto-installable binary version for Windows: Setup.exe using the non commercial Qt version for Windows

In Linux systems, after downloading the file we decompress the sources in this way

je@unit0:~> tar zxvf edfEdit-1.0.tar.gz
edfEdit-1.0/
...
je@unit0:~> cd edfEdit-1.0/
je@unit0:~/edfEdit-1.0>

Now we compile the sources. To do this we need qmake, a utility included in Qt that creates a Makefile

je@unit0:~/edfEdit-1.0> export QTDIR=/usr/lib/qt3
je@unit0:~/edfEdit-1.0> export PATH=$PATH:$QTDIR/bin

It is quite simple: we define the location and change the path to include the binary files needed by Qt

 
je@unit0:~/edfEdit-1.0> qmake
je@unit0:~/edfEdit-1.0> make
g++ -c -pipe -O2 -march=i586 -mcpu=i686 -fmessage-length=0 -fPIC -...

That's all; we have the program at the directory. We do not need further installation. In order to run the program we can make a link to a directory included in the path or you we even create a link on the desktop.

The main window of edfEdit is shown in figure 2.1

Figure 2.1: This is the main window of edfEdit

Now let's speak briefly about the installation on Windows systems: you only have to click on the installer. I would like to say that the main aim of edfEdit was to create a substitute of the utility with the same name included in edftools at Bob Kemp's site able to run on Linux. After creating the first version, I tried to compile the sources with Borland 5.5 and Qt non-commercial such as they are included at the book the official Qt book,C++ GUI Programming with Qt 3. The present version can be compiled with no change. I think that I fill with the requirements of the license so I decided to distribute the executable (the sources are the same than in the Linux version and they are included in the same site, see above). Of course if this is not the case let me know and I will retire the binary files immediately. Since it is necessary to distribute some dll, I used (following the advice of Raphael Schneider) NIS and HM NIS EDIT. The result is a painless installation process.