Time for action – installing Qt using an online installer

First, go to a list of options for different licensing schemes. To use the open source version, choose the Open Source edition licensed under GPL and LGPL. Then, you can click on the Download Now button to retrieve the online installer for the platform that you are currently running on or you can click on any of the header sections to reach a more comprehensive list of options. The links to online installers are at the beginning of the list, as shown in the following screenshot. Click and download the one suited to your host machine:

When the download completes, run the installer, as shown:

Click on Next and after a while of waiting as the downloader checks remote repositories, you'll be asked for the installation path. Be sure to choose a path where you have write access (it's best to put Qt into your personal directory unless you ran the installer as the system administrator user). Clicking on Next again will present you with choices of components that you wish to install, as shown in the following screenshot. You will be given different choices depending on your platform.

Choose whichever platforms you need, for example, to build native and Android applications on Linux, choose both gcc-based installation and one for the desired Android platform. When on Windows, you have to make additional choices. When using Microsoft compilers, you can choose whether to use native OpenGL drivers (the versions with the OpenGL suffix) or to emulate OpenGL ES using DirectX calls. If you don't have a Microsoft compiler or you simply don't want to use it, choose the version of Qt for the MinGW compiler. If you don't have a MinGW installation, don't worry—the installer will also install it for you.

After choosing the needed components and clicking on Next again, you will have to accept the licensing terms for Qt by marking an appropriate choice, as shown in the following screenshot. After clicking on Install, the installer will begin downloading and installing the required packages. Once this is done, your Qt installation will be ready. At the end of the process, you will be given an option to launch Qt Creator.

What just happened?

The process we went through results in the whole Qt infrastructure appearing on your disk. You can examine the directory you pointed to the installer to see that it created a number of subdirectories in this directory—one for each version of Qt chosen with the installer and another one called Tools that contains Qt Creator. You can see that if you ever decide to install another version of Qt, it will not conflict with your existing installation. Furthermore, for each version, you can have a number of platform subdirectories that contain the actual Qt installations for particular platforms.