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Comment by DoofusOfDeath | Hacker News Reader

Anyone have a good way to run Qt Creator locally on their desktop, but edit, build, and debug code running on a remote, headless server?

I love Qt Creator, but this use-case has led me to settle for Vim+gdb over ssh.

[edit] Clarification: X-over-SSH isn't a good solution because of the lag.

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TL;DR: Just set up the "Build" toolchain (configuration) in Qt Creator and point Qt Creator at your target (with the correct ssh user login) for when you click "Run" or "Debug".

http://wiki.qt.io/Raspberry_Pi_Beginners_Guide http://wiki.qt.io/RaspberryPi2EGLFS

These two tutorials use slightly different setups, so don't get confused on details, but both are great to glean tips from.

I've successfully used Qt Creator on both a Linux VM (desktop Intel) and a Windows desktop to build originally-desktop-based Qt projects for embedded Linux on ARM. The projects are not headless, but also do not use X to run the Qt GUI. Instead they use EGLFS.

Even if your software doesn't have a GUI, you can still do remote debugging with Qt Creator... or Eclipse, or Visual Studio , or anything that has the proper hooks.

I don't think any sane developer would want to use a remote X server to get to an instance of an IDE.

As long as you have the proper cross toolchain (some cost $) set up correctly in Qt, and your target code is all included properly (libraries and headers for your target, NOT your dev machine), you should be able to do exactly what you want for any desktop+remote target pair.

Additionally you don't even have to work in Linux to target Embedded Linux:

https://wiki.qt.io/Visual_Studio_Add-in https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/vcblog/2016/03/30/visual-c-...

Specifically, I think the tip to make an exact copy of the target's sysroot structure (libraries, headers, etc) on your dev machine using rsync (and remember to fix the symbolic links!) is very valuable.

Then make sure your project is (only) aware of those headers and libraries.

Are you looking for something like Emacs' Tramp mode (https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/TrampMode)?

We've been working on an equivalent that can work with IDEs like QtCreator.

Send me a note to the email in my profile, lets see if we can help out.

have you tried sshfs?

That's just going to do remote file management, and introduce small lockups when you hit ^S if your latency is unideal.

I'm not sure if distcc is the answer here - I've never tried it - but it probably would be some people's default/first response.

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