Using Qt ARM prebuilt binaries to cross-compile

Question

I have a small ARM board with Arch Linux ARM distro. There are ARM Qt 5.5.0 binaries available in the repositories.

I want to cross-compile a program using Qt for that board on my Ubuntu Trusty x86_64 virtual machine. Do I need to cross-compile Qt from source first or there is a way to reuse prebuilt ARM binaries?

I mean, when I try to set a Qt kit in Qt Creator, it wants me to point to qmake executable. And ARM executable isn't, well, executable on my build machine. So it seems I need to build Qt in order to get qmake. But then it comes with its own set of libraries and I'm not sure I can replace them.

Answer 1

Depending on how much memory you have on your ARM board you could consider to compile directly on your board. You then have to install the dev package of Qt.

On the Orange Pi One board I can even run Qt Creator directly on the board. On smaller boards which don't have a HDMI output I run a VNC server and use the Qt Creator running on the board by a window on my host computer which is connected to the board over Wifi.

On even smaller boards I usually create my own image using buildroot which is very comfortable and supports development and cross-compilation using Qt Creator on the host machine.

Hope this helps.