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Install and build QtEDM ​

Prerequisites ​

  • Build tools: GNU Make-compatible build environment, pkg-config, and a platform C/C++ compiler. On Linux this is typically gcc and g++.

  • EPICS Base (required): place an epics-base checkout at the same directory level as this repository (for example, ../epics-base when you are in medm/).

    Note: the build system also checks ../../epics-base from subdirectories such as qtedm/ and medm/; this is an internal relative path and can look confusing in error messages.

  • Qt development packages (required):

    • Qt6 preferred (Qt6Core, Qt6Widgets, Qt6PrintSupport, Qt6Svg)
    • Qt5 fallback (Qt5Core, Qt5Widgets, Qt5PrintSupport, Qt5Svg)
    • moc and rcc must be available

Typical Debian/Ubuntu packages for a Linux build:

bash
sudo apt-get install build-essential pkg-config qt6-base-dev qt6-svg-dev

Optional for legacy MEDM build as well:

bash
sudo apt-get install libmotif-dev libxmu-dev

Build QtEDM ​

  1. Clone dependencies next to this repository:
bash
git clone --recursive -b 7.0 https://github.com/epics-base/epics-base.git
  1. Build EPICS Base (see EPICS Base docs for full options):
bash
cd ../epics-base
make -j4
  1. From this repository root, build:
bash
make -j4

Notes:

  • qtedm can be built without Motif. Building the legacy medm executable requires Motif/X11 where available.
  • Linux and macOS builds do not require an SDDS checkout. Windows retains the existing GSL source-tree setup; the legacy Windows printUtils and xc builds also retain their SDDS source and library settings.
  • If Qt is missing, the top-level build exits with an error after dependency checks.
  • On Linux, the build prefers /usr/bin/pkg-config so an active Conda environment does not select Conda's Qt through its pkg-config wrapper. This also applies inside rhel8-shell, where /usr refers to the RHEL 8 container. To select another installation, set PKG_CONFIG and, if needed, PKG_CONFIG_PATH explicitly. For example: make -j4 PKG_CONFIG=/path/to/pkg-config. Clean before switching between host and container builds or Qt installations: run make clean, then make -j4 in the selected shell.
  • On macOS and Windows, use the equivalent native compiler, Qt development tools and EPICS Base setup for that platform. The repository uses the same .adl display files across platforms.

The resulting programs are always copied to bin/<OS>-<architecture>/. When the checkout is under an EPICS extensions/src/ directory containing configure/CONFIG and configure/RELEASE, they are also copied to <INSTALL_LOCATION_EXTENSIONS>/bin/<EPICS_HOST_ARCH>/, falling back to <INSTALL_LOCATION>/bin/<EPICS_HOST_ARCH>/. The default shared destination is extensions/bin/<EPICS_HOST_ARCH>/; extensions configuration overrides apply. For example, a typical 64-bit Linux build produces:

text
bin/Linux-x86_64/qtedm
bin/Linux-x86_64/qtedm-convert