Qt 5.x for Cubieboard - A10/A20 general notions

At the moment, I'm without a working A10 Cubieboard, so the work I keep publishing is mostly A20 oriented.

But if you own an A10, there's absolutely no reason for you not to play around with Qt 5 on it.

On A20, in order to take full advantage of the Mali GPU, the r3p2-01rel2 Mali libraries or above are needed. But this usually requires adding some patches to the kernel, prior to everything else.

On A10, the optimizations aren't so meaningful, which means you can skip this kernel hacking step and just use a stock image, which will support r3p0 Mali.

So for the A10 SoC, you may as well follow these simpler steps:

1- decide whether you want to have Qt with or without X

2- get Cubian for A10

3- install the Mali libraries - r3p0 - and confirm that you get the colored test triangle

Natively compiling Qt5:

If you decide to natively compile Qt5, stop here and follow this sunxi guide (use whichever new stable release is available instead of the stated 5.1.1 version, adapt in case you're going for framebuffer instead of X11).

Cross-compiling Qt5:

4- make an image file out of the SD Card and move on to your development host machine

5- if you have a 64bit OS, make sure it's ready to deal with 32bit libraries/binaries

6- grab a working toolchain - I've been using Linaro GCC but the recommended toolchain for Cubian is also a possibility

7- grab the latest stable Qt5 sources (this link is for 5.3, linux sources. Adjust to your host OS)

8- cross-compile Qt5 using these instructions, from step 4 onwards - just use the patches if needed, the device mkspec files for cubieboard and the configure line.