Before you start the PyQt5 tutorial you will need to have a working installation of PyQt5 on your system. If you don't have either set up yet, the following steps will guide you through how to do this on Linux.

This guide is also available for macOS and Windows.

Note that the following instructions are only for installation of the GPL licensed version of PyQt. If you need to use PyQt in a non-GPL project you will need to purchase an alternative license from Riverbank Computing to release your software.

The simplest way to install PyQt5 on Linux is to use Python's pip packaging tool, just as for other packages. For Python3 installations this is usually called pip3.

Packages for PyQt5 are available in the repositories of most distributions, although they may sometimes be out of date. Check first to ensure you're getting an up to date version, and if not use the pip method above. In Ubuntu you can install either from the command line or via "Software Center". The package you are looking for is named python3-pyqt5.

You can also install these from the command line as follows --

After install is finished, you should be able to run python (or python3) and import PyQt5 without errors.

You can now start creating Python GUI applications with PyQt5.

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