the thing is that the fontconfig version provided by red hat is too old and missing a symbol (I read that it is the sub sub version number that is to low and that is causing the missing symbol). If you simply update fontconfig it doesnt seem to work for me because it finds the oldest version still but when I change the makefile to link to the newer libfontconfig.so directly it work. In your .pro file add the following line: LIB+= /path/to/your/NewFontConfiglib.so.X.X Also, simply doing a yum update doesnt work, it says package up to date, I read a post that showed how to add the newer one. Later on, I decided I need to build my app standalone so I started building a static version of Qt and got into the same problem.....I was not sure how to modify that makefile though and came across this post so hopefully it will work. Take a look at this post: CentOS 5.2 + Qt 4.5 + FcFreeTypeQueryFace