I installed the open source version of Qt 4.1.0 on two Windows 2000 boxes with Service Pack 4, and neither installation was perfect.

Both Windows 2000 boxes have Cygwin, which I refreshed just before trying to install Qt. I did that because MinGW is part of Cygwin, and I thought that would be sufficient, but that didn't work. I was able to compile tutorial t1, but I was NOT able to link it because some MinGW libraries are missing from Cygwin.

Next, I downloaded one .exe file and several tar.gz and tar.bz2 file from mingw.org. Without Cygwin's tar and bzip2, I would not have been able to install MinGW from those files. Just for the record, Cygwin's installation is flawless and painless.

After I installed a complete MinGW environment, I installed Qt, but the installation did NOT go smoothly. The first complaint was that the Qt installer was UNABLE to detect that MinGW WAS installed in the very same directory that it sought: C:\MinGW!

The installer warned me that my installation might not work if I continued, but I knew that I had installed MinGW in the right place and continued. Dogged perseverance and repetition ad nauseam paid off.

I am not fond of the Windows 2000 CMD command line and prefer to use the Cygwin POSIX environment; so, I defined QTDIR and QMAKESPEC, set MINGW_IN_SHELL=1 to convince qmake when I run it from Cygwin that I have a full MinGW environment, and added $QTDIR/bin to my Cygwin shell's PATH.

With that, I was able to compile tutorial/t1, but I wasn't able to link it until I modified $QTDIR/mkspecs/win32-g++/qmake.conf because qmake builds Makefiles that can't link binaries or executables.

What did I add to qmake.conf?

I changed the line that reads
QMAKE_LIBS_QT_ENTRY = -lmingw32 -lqtmain
to
QMAKE_LIBS_QT_ENTRY = -L"C:/MinGW/lib" -lmingw32 -lqtmain

After that, I was able to compile and link successfully.

On both Windows 2000 boxes, the files $QTDIR/lib/*.prl are installed with the file mode 700 and a group name of ????????!

On one computer where I installed Qt, I am not an administrator, but as an end user I can install anything, but on the other box, I am an unprivileged user who must ask an administrator to install software.

I didn't have a problem using Qt on the first computer, but I couldn't use Qt on the second computer until I repaired the file modes which caused the problem.

A file mode of 700 for all those *.prl files is WRONG because compilations fail when the compiler tries to open those files when the compiler is run by an end user who is not the owner of those files. All end users fall under the category of other and have no access to any of those files which means that compilations will fail!

Fortunately, it's very easy to fix that problem. Use Cygwin to chmod go+rx *.prl those files back into legible files for all users who fall under the categories of group and other. It may even be sufficient to use chmod go+r *.prl, but I didn't try that.

I don't have a clue about how to submit changes to improve the installation process on Windows 2000 for those who will come after me besides sounding off as I have just done.