This is the third 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.

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++
tru64-cxx
tru64-g++
solaris-cc
solaris-g++
linux-g++
linux-kcc
freebsd-g++
unixware7-g++
unixware7-cc
aix-g++
aix-xlc
hpux-acc

During the beta period, we will add support for more Unix platforms
and compilers e.g. HP-UX/gcc. If you test the beta on an a 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.
