mchelper is built with Qt4, a cross-platform C++ GUI framework by Trolltech.  Fortunately, for open source projects Qt is provided freely under the GNU GPL. There can be a few snags along the way trying to get this set up on your system, so we'll outline the steps for getting Qt installed properly on your machine.


For all platforms, mchelper currently requires at least Qt 4.3 so you may need to upgrade your installation.

Windows

On Windows, you'll almost certainly want to download the Qt installer that also installs MinGW. Check out the Qt Windows Download Page and grab whatever the latest version is, making sure to get the version that looks like /path/to/qt-win-opensource-4.x.x-mingw.exe. This should get you an installer that will get you all set up with just a double click.

OS X

Download the latest source for Qt on OS X here. Once you've uncompressed the source package, there's the potentially sticky issue of building Qt. It's actually not bad at all, but there are a couple configuration flags to be sure to set when you're building it.

We'll venture into Terminal.app to build Qt. There are just a couple of flags of interest:

• prefix - where to install Qt. I usually just keep this in /Developer/Qt-4.x.x, although the default location is /usr/local/Trolltech/Qt-4.x.x
• static - specifies whether Qt is built as static or shared libraries. The default is as shared libraries, which makes for quicker rebuilds and is generally recommended. However, to distribute your final app to people that don't have Qt installed, you'll need to build it statically. Kind of a drag.  If you happen to have two machines, or enough room on your machine, it's worth installing a non-static version for normal development, mainly for the faster compile times.
  
• universal - whether to the Qt installation will create Universal Binary code or code for your native platform.
• sdk - the path to the OS X SDK Qt will use. If you've passed the -universal flag, make sure this SDK is for OS X 10.4 or later.
• demos & examples - I prefer not to build the demos and examples, so I use the -nomake flag to prevent them from being built.  This, of course, is up to you.

So, a sample configuration for building Qt might look like this:

# cd into the src directory...I keep mine in /Developer/Qt-src-4.x.x
cd /Developer/Qt-src-4.x.x

# now configure the build process, then build it
./configure -prefix /Developer/Qt-4.x.x -universal -sdk /Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.4u.sdk 
-nomake demos -nomake examples
make
sudo make install

This will take quite a while, so make sure you have some other exciting things to do in the meantime. When it's finally finished, you'll want to add the Qt tools to your path. There are plenty of ways to do this, but I just either do it in vi or in another editor like TextMate:

sudo vi /etc/profile
# add /Developer/Qt-4.x.x/bin to your path.

Then you should be in pretty good shape.

Linux/Other

Grab the latest Qt download from http://trolltech.com/developer/downloads/qt/x11 and adapt the instructions above to your system.