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There is a bash command that comes with installing PyQT Creator called designer that will run a tool called Qt Designer, found under the Qt Creator package. It helps you create GUIs - pretty cool stuff.

There is a problem though... whenever I run designer, I get this error:

designer: could not exec '/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/qt4/bin/designer': No such file or directory

And that's great - I don't want it to execute /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/qt4/bin/designer, I want it to execute /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/qt5/bin/designer, the difference being between "qt4" (first path) and "qt5" (second path). That's where designer is.

I looked around and found this command type -a (command) and it would tell you where the command definition is "located", if I understand correctly. So I looked it up and got:

$ type -a designer
designer is /usr/bin/designer

But I can't edit that file... it's a bunch of gibberish (side question, what does it mean when a file has no file extension? What does that make it?)

So, my question is, how can I get the command designer to execute /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/qt5/bin/designer?

Edit: which designer also returns /usr/bin/designer,

also: $ file /usr/bin/designer /usr/bin/designer: symbolic link to qtchooser'

So I also took a look at qtchooser... seems like its a command (not entirely sure what it does).

Here is some output:

file /usr/bin/qtchooser 
/usr/bin/qtchooser: ELF 64-bit LSB  executable, x86-64, version 1 (SYSV), dynamically linked (uses shared libs), for GNU/Linux 2.6.24, BuildID[sha1]=96215e9441b8361f0cc57b37db70fc50752cb05a, stripped
dessert
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John Lexus
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    You can read about the file extension topic here: https://askubuntu.com/questions/48019/what-are-the-common-file-extensions-in-ubuntu. In (IIRC all) Linux systems, files don't have a file extension by default. – dessert Nov 10 '17 at 22:47
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    file /usr/bin/designer to find out what kind of file it is. – AlexP Nov 10 '17 at 22:51
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    Am I right that the output ot which designer is also /usr/bin/designer? Please add the output of file /usr/bin/designer to your question using the formatting tools. – dessert Nov 10 '17 at 22:52
  • @dessert made the edits – John Lexus Nov 10 '17 at 22:56
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    OK, so qtchooser doesn't know about QT5 and thinks you have QT4 instead – tricky! If it's just for designer, I'd just define an alias with alias designer=/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/qt5/bin/designer in the ~/.bash_aliases file. – dessert Nov 10 '17 at 22:59
  • Very related: https://askubuntu.com/questions/820054/selecting-qt5-using-qtchooser. Try export QT_SELECT=qt5 and if that doesn't help sudo apt install qt5-qmake! – dessert Nov 10 '17 at 23:00
  • @dessert yeah that's what I did as a workaround. Didn't know qtchooser was the culprit though. Thanks for letting me know – John Lexus Nov 10 '17 at 23:00
  • @dessert I tried that just now (the link you posted) and it didnt work :( – John Lexus Nov 10 '17 at 23:03

1 Answers1

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Thanks to @dessert for helping me out.

I ran sudo apt-get install qt5-default and everything worked fine.

The answer was "inspired" from the answer here, which didn't work for me, but might work for you if you are having the same problem and my solution didnt work.

While this does not directly answer my question... it solves my problem, so yay

dessert
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John Lexus
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    I know I'm a bit out of time, but I just found this resource which I want to sare. Basically, you can edit /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/qt-default/qtchooser/default.conf changing the default to /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/qt5/bin and whenever you call designer it will launch the qt5 one! – umbe1987 Aug 09 '18 at 20:38