Try and fail to install Qtvcp GUI

What is Qtvcp and why bother?

I've so far found that Probe Basic Lathe isn't finished and doesn't (yet?) support add-ins such as Andy Pugh's  lathe macros. Looks nice but is a work in progress. A large update is apparently in the pipeline but there's no indication of timing or any update on progress, assuming it's happening. I'm not criticising but if I'm looking for a stable lathe GUI that I don't need to keep messing with, it's probably not PB Lathe for now.

Having said all this, I see a user on the LinuxCNC forum (anfänger) has made some progress implementing macros in PB Lathe. I must give this a go, although I now find my PBL installation doesn't work any more, presumably since I updated the RTOS recently.

I've also tried gmoccapy as an alternative. This seems to be more robust and mature but TBH, the GUI is pretty clunky - the sort of appearance you might get from an engineer rather than an artistic designer. Not saying I'd do as well or any better but it's not quite what I am after:

There are other options, so I thought I'd try a couple out and see if they look / feel more suitable. But first I need to install Qtvcp to run many of them.

Installing Qtvcp:

Here's how you go about it. You have to download the install script, save it as Qtvcp_install.sh (in my case), then make it executable. The script is available here and you can follow this procedure to make it executable.

You mark the file as executable:

chmod +x Qtvcp_install.sh

Then execute it like this:

./Qtvcp_install.sh

Hmm. That didn't go well. And reading the evolving Qtvcp thread on the LinuxCNC forum, it seems that recent changes to Python have broken the implementation that had been developed and honed in previous releases of LinuxCNC. It appears that v2.8 doesn't work with it and there's no way to fix it unless somebody (not me!!) goes in and fixed Qtvcp to work with the current version of Python. So that seems to have cooked the Qtvcp goose for the time bing....

Goodbye Qtvcp - for now

I may come back to this later if it appears the installation is sensibly possible. But that time isn't now.