Hello,
I am trying to learn how to use FET to see if it will work for making my school's timetables. I installed it successfully (twice -- to be explained shortly) and began to play with entering data while following the user manual, but arrive at a point around the Hours/day or Students blanks (depending on the version -- again, to be explained shortly) where the program is not responding to the keyboard. I can click into or out of fields with the mouse, but cannot enter anything with the keyboard.
I know that the problem is not with the keyboard or anything so simple as that. I have now experienced the same problem on a version 5.9 that I downloaded and compiled myself (which hung at around Students) and a pre-compiled version 5.4 I got from the Ubuntu Hardy repository (I forgot to specify that I am running Ubuntu 8.04) that hung around Hours/day.
Perhaps I should mention that the only other data I have tried to enter is what is called for in the fields preceding the two in question above, that is my institution name, Days/wk, and maybe some teacher names.
Has anybody else experienced a similar problem? Is this a bug somewhere, or am I missing a fundamental startup requirement? I have done a search through this forum and not found anything, but if somebody knows better than I, then a simple thread link would be much-appreciated. Thanks.
Maybe you are using an old Qt. Please type "qmake -version" and tell me what you get (maybe also type "lupdate -version" or open Qt designer and see what version you have in Help/About). FET has this kind of bug when working with Qt 4.2.x, but the problem seems a bit different: in what I know, you cannot click the "Add group" button.
Thanks for the reply. Here is the information you requested:
$ qmake --version
QMake version 2.01a
Using Qt version 4.3.4 in /usr/lib
and...
$ lupdate -version
lupdate version 4.3.4
I did note the bit about problems with Qt 4.2.x in the README, but I thought this was only an issue when one got a certain error message during compilation. Also, why would the pre-compiled version I downloaded through Synaptic also have the same problem?
The Qt 4.2.x has some similar problems - you cannot click "add students" or "add room" in the dialogs.
I don't know what might be the problem - Qt 4.3.x should work OK with FET. Maybe you could try with latest Qt 4.4.3 - but it is hard to update Qt on Ubuntu.
I don't know why the precompiled version has also problems.
Maybe you could try to install GNU/Linux openSUSE, it has the latest Qt.
Maybe reboot your computer and recompile FET.
Thanks again for your suggestions. I'm not really sure I can manually update to QT 4.4.3, but I'll try downloading the source and compiling/installing, then seeing what happens.
As for re-compiling FET, I'll try this. I must wait to set it in motion until I'm going home this evening, though. Yesterday the process took about three hours on my machine (1 GHZ cpu, 512 Mb RAM). Hopefully tomorrow I can send a status report. If this still doesn't work, then I can try the latest openSUSE.
You have a slow computer, and unfortunately compilation takes very long.
I can tell you that compiling Qt takes very long (maybe more than 6 hours on your computer).
I do not wish to promote openSUSE against other distributions, but I can tell you that I prefer it over Ubuntu. The packages are newer (newer versions) and there are more precompiled packages. I strongly advice to install it, instead of trying to manually compile/install Qt on Ubuntu.
To install openSUSE maybe takes 1 hour or more on your computer.
Please let me know.
Please give me a day or two. To be continued...
OK, here is the follow-up to what came earlier in this thread:
The original problem seems to be solved (hooray!) -- at least, the gui buttons that weren't working last week are now working. I should add the qualification that I haven't done a thorough check of all of the features of fet, only some playing around with entering data in the most basic fields.
What solved my problem was downloading the qt4.4.3 source code and compiling it on my system, then re-compiling fet with that. I am still using my Ubuntu Hardy installation which (against the recommendation of the fet README) uses gcc version 4.2.4. Perhaps the bug mentioned in the readme has been fixed (?). Ubuntu Hardy users should not use the precompiled version of fet available on Synaptic. In my experience, even this has the same problems as mentioned earlier in the thread.
Following Liviu's suggestion to use openSUSE, I did install openSUSE 11.1 on a dual-boot system at home.. The reason I am not reporting success from that machine is twofold: 1) I always seem to have problems with download speeds from SUSE's servers -- while doing the post-install updates my download speeds were often measured in bytes/s and frequently timed out (this on a dsl connection that allows 100Mb/s); 2) I don't understand enough of what qt is to know which packages I need to download from the package repositories (this is also a problem on Ubuntu). There are loads of libqt4xx's, plus a qt4xx that is called devel-tools (if I remember correctly). I downloaded the qt4x package on openSUSE, but bash still did not recognize the command qmake. I didn't get around to finding out which of the libqt packages would have it.
In the meantime, I downloaded the qt source code applicable to my system from http://www.qtsoftware.com/downloads/opensource/appdev/linux-x11-cpp , built and installed it according to the installation instructions in the tarball, and rebuilt fet from there. As I said above, it seems to be working now.
Thanks for your help, Liviu. If there is any other information I should try to include to make this thread helpful to others, please let me know so I can add it.
Thank you for letting us know. This information is enough.