Solid Smoke

As explained here , I wanted to build RPMs for Qt 4.4 for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5. Compiling from sources was taking way too much time and was not attracting any developer love. If you want to use Qt 4.4 with RHEL 5, you'll need an updated version of KDevelop ( > 3.4) too. And that requires an updated version of GDB (v6.8). So you'll need to find those RPMs as well. Building an RPM is apparently a complicated process and you'll find lots of articles online (some very dated). But there's a way to reuse the packaging generated for Fedora. That way, you don't have to mess with source archives, patches and write spec files from scratch. Getting the source packages Koji is Fedora Project's build system. You can checkout source packages from http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/ and use it to build on RHEL. Cool, huh? But be aware of possible compatibility issues. Using the search facility of Koji site, I downloaded the following src.rpm files. qt-4.4.0-11.fc10....

In my office, the Linux buzz is growing, with more and more engineers trying their hand at Qt programming. I've been helping people install Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (RHEL 5) and get started with Qt 4. RHEL 5.1 comes with older (aka stable, or proven , as we like to call in our industry) versions of Qt, KDevelop and GDB. So, to make things easier, I set out to customise an RHEL 5 DVD. My original plan was to create a kick-start file for easier installation. Then I became too ambitious and decided to customise the whole damn thing. After several days of meddling with rpms and xml files, I'm happy to announce SUCCESS!! This post is meant to be a guide to all those brave souls who wish to do the same. Fear not, comrades, it's not as difficult as it looks like. In fact, if you don't want to build any new RPMs, it's quite easy. You can reportedly use a tool called Revisor to easily customise a Fedora / Red Hat distribution. I'm no sure about the effectiveness of th...