The point is to use a different prefix than your shared installation has and to call make install to install the static version there. You should end up with two distinct Qt trees, one shared and one static. You can then try to link the two trees together, for example by substituting the include directory with a link to the include directory of the other tree, etc. You should be able to do the same with the doc, mkspecs, translations and phrasebooks directories. And you can delete demos and examples as you probably won't need static versions of those. Note that I'm talking about full compilation here, not only about compiling sub-src. For sub-src you probably won't have some of the directories at all.