I need QT4 to run Lyx, a typesetting front end.

Here is my question: I know there is a good slackbuild for qt4. Can I build qt4 and still keep the qt3.3 that is inside of Slackware by default?

If anyone else knows a good LaTEX frontend that works like Lyx that doesn't require a build like this, I am open to suggestion.

I tried TeXmacs once, but it kept segfaulting on load (which was more than likely a fault caused during compilation) - I'm pretty sure it's a LyX alternative for the GTK+ toolkit.

You can install Qt4, with Qt3.3 in the background, but I think you may have to do it by compiling from source unless you can tell the slackbuild to install to a directory other than the standard install directory (maybe install it to /opt).

Qt4 from slackbuilds.org doesn't interfere with the pre-installed Qt3 in any way, so it is save to install.

yeah most packages install qt4 to /opt/qt4

although , i would recommend you get a precompiled package .. qt4 takes obscene amounts of time to compile.

I know it's not the same at all, but I've been using asciidoc (included in Slackware) for some time now. If you are only interested in writing books and articles, it's very fine and easy to use. When the output format is not HTML, the support for images is flacky, and support for mathematical formulas is almost nonexistant. But, like I said, if you need to write an essay or article or manual or something along those lines, it's amazing. You simply write the text in a .txt file using some very simple conventions, and it's able to create docbook from it. Whatever you do with the docbook output is another question. I use FOP to create a good-looking PDF files.

On my two boxes I have qt-4.3.3 compiled from source and i didn't have any problems. Make sure that when you start the configuration, you type:
so that gmake knows where to install and to not owerwrite /usr/lib/qt.

When you comnpile your LaTex program, you must specify where qt4 is (i believe is )

The only problem when you compile qt is that it eats to much space (at the end of the compilation the qt directory with the source will have beetween 1.4 and 2 Gb). Total time of the compilation depends on your processor (on my Core2Dou E4400 @2Ghz it took beetween 30 min and 40 min). Good luck and have fun

Slackbuild.org has slackbuilds for QT4 and Lyx that doesn't conflict with the default QT3. Very nice, use them myself.

As for an alternate LaTEX frontend, I find LyX the easiest to use without learnint LaTEX, but if you know LaTEX or are willing to learn, Kile for KDE is the best I've found. Slackbuilds.org has it too.

You should see it compiling on a Winblows machine. Then you would see what "obscene amounts of time" realy means.

Jokes aside.
Qt4 can coexist with Qt3, and I think I installed rlworkmans build(or it's just on his site) on a VM alongside with Qt3 and it installed into /usr/lib/qt4 but that was a long time ago, around the time when he posted the KDE4 packages here. But if you look for that thread someone posted there a different set of KDE4 packages that coexist with KDE3, meaning that the machine needs qt3 AND qt4 package, so I'm sure it's there.