PiCute — QT5 on the Raspberry PI

What it was

PiCute was a Raspbian-based OS for the Raspberry PI running the QT5.4 graphical framework — developer and runtime versions, built on the pipaOS XGUI base. You could run QT5 apps on the X server or directly on EGLFS, framebuffer-only. Written for developers and testers; feedback from the Kano Computing team helped shape it — chunks of this work made it into their official devices for kids.

Features

OpenGL ES 2.0 and Linux framebuffer backend (EGLFS)
X server with Fluxbox window manager
GIF, JPEG and PNG codec support
QT5 networking with SSL; SQLite plugin enabled
xkbcommon enabled — intermixed HID support on the X server
Developer version: most QT5 official examples compiled with source + QTCreator v3.4.0
Runs on Raspberry PI models B and 2 (and probably model A too)

Run it, 2014 edition

Burn the developer image, boot, log in sysop/posys. From the shell:

$ startx
$ cd /usr/local/picute/v5.4.1/examples
$ ./opengl/hellogl2/hellogl2

# build Quint, a fun little project:
$ git clone https://github.com/skarbat/quint.git
$ cd quint
$ /usr/local/picute/v5.4.1/bin/qmake && make
$ ./quint

Apps built on the developer image ran straight away on the runtime image. QTCreator: create a Kit pointing at /usr/local/picute/v5.4.1/bin/qmake, then build on one PI and push to a second networked PI running the runtime version. Test-deploy loops, 2014 style.

Screenshots

The QT5 examples gallery ran natively on the PI's VideoCore IV GPU: HelloGL2 on EGLFS, Quint, Flickr on QML, animated tiles, particle affectors/emitters/custom GLSL shaders, tvtennis in 50 lines of QML, desktop widgets on Fluxbox, easing curves, dialogs and wizards.

Downloads and packages

Wheezy DEB packages made installation painless on other PI distros — point apt at deb http://archive.mitako.eu wheezy main, then install picute-qt5 (plus picute-qt5-dev for building). The original archive also shipped developer/runtime images and a standalone runtime-libs tarball.

Why it mattered

QT on the PI turned a hobby board into the possibility of shipping beautiful, desktop-grade software. The same work fed into KanoOS — powering an entire generation of starter computers for thousands of kids.