Run Qt Design Studio on NixOS

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1

Has anyone managed to run Qt Design Studio on NixOS? I have been tinkering with it for a couple of days and still couldn’t get it to work.

I have been trying the patching method from this Stack’s answer. However the methods are more oriented towards Debian execs.

The steps I took:

  1. I downloaded qt-designstudio-linux-x86_64-2.3.1-community.run
  2. Then, I used steam-run to run the installer.
  3. After the successful installation I tried to patch the binary with patchelf
  4. And then, although all the libraries were linked I get the following error:

image
image1083×136 3.85 KB

So the question is: Should I tinker with it even more, or is there a better way to run Qt Products on NixOS?

Note: I tried installing QT Creator on NixOS but it is too buggy (I get SEGFAULT while on Design Tab).

2

You’ll need to write a Nix package for Qt Design Studio, rather than only patching the binary, because Qt has special considerations on NixOS. In short, you need a wrapper so that the application can find Qt plugins. See Nixpkgs 23.11 manual | Nix & NixOS

3

Thanks for the hint.

Should I make it for the installer or for the executable?

What’s more, the installer has it’s own GUI, so is it even possible to extract it anyhow?

4

You should package the executable. It may be possible to bypass the GUI installer, since it seems it’s built with https://makeself.io/

1 Like
5

Wow, thanks a lot!

Never knew about makeself.io before, would definitely check it out!

6

I have created the following derivation:

flake.nix:

{
  description = "Qt Design Studio";

  inputs = {
    nixpkgs.url = "github:NixOS/nixpkgs";
    flake-utils.url = "github:numtide/flake-utils";
  };

  outputs = { self, nixpkgs, flake-utils }:
    flake-utils.lib.eachDefaultSystem (system: 
    let
      # Helper to provide system-specific attributes
      pname = "qtdesignstudio";
      version = "v2.3.1";

      pkgs = import nixpkgs { inherit system; };

    in { 
        #packages.default = pkgs.callPackage ./. {inherit pname version nativeBuildInputs buildInputs; };
        packages.default = pkgs.qt6Packages.callPackage ./. {inherit pname version; };
    }
  );
}

default.nix:

{ pname, version, stdenv, pkgs, qtbase, wrapQtAppsHook  }: 

stdenv.mkDerivation {
  
  inherit pname version; 

  src = ./qtdesignstudio;

  buildInputs = with pkgs; [
    qt6.qt5compat
    gcc-unwrapped
  ] ++ [ qtbase ];

  unpackPhase = ":";  # omit unpackPhase

  nativeBuildInputs = with pkgs; [ autoPatchelfHook ] ++ [ wrapQtAppsHook ]; 

  installPhase = ''
    mkdir -p $out/bin
    cp $src $out/bin
  '';
}

It works almost fine as it couldn’t locate 3 local libraries, namely libExtensionSystem.so.2, libUtils.so.2 and libAggregation.so.2:

image
image1249×347 15 KB

Is there any way to link it with AutoPatchelfHook?

1 Like
7

Did you get this running?

8

Unfortunately, no.

The closest I got was to encounter libQt5SerialPort.so.5 dependency error. You can read more about it here.

I am just scared that it is almost impossible to mix Qt 5 and Qt 6 libs while building the derivation so I gave it up for now.

1 Like