This is the first beta version of Qt 3.0.
 
This new generation of the Qt application development framework contains
 many new features, improvements and extensions. It also includes a
 significantly improved Qt Designer, and introduces Qt Linguist, Qt
 Assistant and a new multi-platform build tool, qmake.
 
The Qt API is very unlikely to undergo any significant changes before
 the final release is made, so we encourage you to begin enjoying Qt 3.0
 right now.
 
A few classes are marked in the documentation with "The API for this
 class is under development and is subject to change". These classes are
 not yet suitable for production work. This includes the accessability
 API, the style engine and parts of the component system.
 
Detailed changes information on what's new in Qt 3.0 is included in
 the Online Reference Documentation.  For a brief overview, see
 http://www.trolltech.com/company/announce/30pre.html
 
Thanks to our greatly enlarged development team we have been able to
 realise far more of your requests in this release. Qt 3.0 is a huge step
 towards realising our vision of an ideal cross-platform development
 tool.
 
The Qt version 3.x series is not binary compatible with the 2.x
 series. This means programs compiled with Qt version 2.x must be
 recompiled to work with Qt 3.0.
 
Qt 3.0 will be mostly, but not completely, source compatible with the
 Qt 2.x series. See the document "Porting from Qt 2.x to Qt 3.0" in the
 Online Reference Documentation for information on how to port an
 existing Qt 2.x-based program to Qt 3.0. Disclaimer: the guide is not
 entirely complete, so it is possible that you'll discover issues that
 are not yet covered.
 
Because of the many improvements and extensions and the few parts of the
 API which are still being finalised, we expect this beta period to last
 longer than what you are typically used to from Trolltech. Unlike
 previous Qt releases where most of the beta testing was done with
 snapshot releases, this is not yet a final release candidate.
 
The most visible change for long term Qt users is the reworked build
 system.  On MS-Windows, unpack the package and start installer.exe; on
 Unix, unpack the package and run ./configure. Compiling and installing
 Qt uses a new utility 'qmake' that we also recommend for writing Qt
 based applications. 'qmake' is the successor of our free software add-on
 'tmake', and is written using Qt rather than Perl and is very compatible
 with its predecessor.
 
To improve maintainibility between different platforms, all specific
 platform #defines and #includes have been moved out of the Qt sources
 into a platform specific qplatformdefs.h file.  The files are located in
 qt/mkspec/<platform>-<compiler>/qplatformdefs.h. For this beta release,
 the following platforms have been tested:
 
win32-borland
win32-msvc
 
irix-o32
irix-n32
irix-g++
osf1-cxx
osf-g++
solaris-cc
solaris-g++
linux-g++
linux-kcc
freebsd-g++
unixware7-g++
 
During the beta period, we will add support for more Unix platforms e.g.
 AIX and HP-UX. If you test the beta on an as yet unsupported Unix,
 please contact us at support@trolltech.com so that we can assist you.
 

 How to get the beta release:
 
Qt Free Edition: Download the .tar.gz archive from
 ftp.trolltech.com. To get better download times, use ftpsearch and
 search for qt-x11-free-3.0.0-beta1.tar.gz to find it on a mirror ftp
 site near you.
 
Qt Professional Edition, Qt Enterprise Edition: Holders of valid
 licenses should have received an e-mail with instructions on how to
 get the beta. Contact sales@trolltech.com if you are a Professional or
 Enterprise Edition licensee and have not received this e-mail.
 

 Any problems encountered with the beta version should be reported to
 qt-bugs@trolltech.com, or on the snapshot-users mailing list.
 
Qt is a trademark of Trolltech AS.
