Cross-platform Pascal using Lazarus

This past Thursday (February 5th) I made a presentation about how to install Lazarus on Windows and Linux (Ubuntu) for the Pacific Northwest Delphi User Group.

For the presentation I created a Virtual Machine for both Windows and Ubuntu to demo  the installation and I was asked to share it with the group. I figure other people could make use of it as well. So I decided to post it on my site. Off course that the Windows virtual machine can not be posted so don’t expect to find it here – sorry.

The Ubuntu VM is a using a VMWare virtual machine version 6.5 that can be run on Vmware’s Workstation,  Player, and VirtualBox  in both Windows or Linux. Two things to keep in mind when using VirtualBox is to “Enable IO APIC” on the General->Advanced tab, and to uninstall VMware AddIns before using it with VBox (Thanks Christoph!).

The VM contains the latest Lazarus IDE  running on Ubuntu 8.10. On the desktop of the VM you will find the script (Laz) that I used to install Lazarus. The user name is axf and the password is lazarus.

The file containing this VM can be found here. Be forewarned that the download is a hefty 1.8 GB – so go grab a cup of coffee, finish that project, clean up the garage… you get the idea.

While Windows installation is pretty straightforward – the usual download and install routine applies – the same can not be said about installing Lazarus on Linux.

I started by looking at the packages provided by the repositories and decided against because the packages where about a year old.  So I went to the Lazarus site and downloaded the Debian packages and ran into problems such as missing dependencies and the like.

After looking around I found a script that added the current lazarus repositories, dowloaded and installed lazarus.  The script is as follows:

#!/bin/sh
gpg –keyserver hkp://pgp.mit.edu:11371 –recv-keys 6A11800F
gpg –export 6A11800F | apt-key add –
echo “deb http://www.hu.freepascal.org/lazarus/ lazarus-stable universe” \
>/etc/apt/sources.list.d/lazarus.list
apt-get update
apt-get install lazarus

I also had to make changes on the Lazarus folder to allow my user to recompile and install components. So to correct permissions issues I created the user group Lazarus (or whatever name you like)  and added myself to the group. Changed permissions for the folder /usr/lib/lazarus by issuing the following command:

sudo chown -R :lazarus /usr/lib/lazarus

and the allowed the group to read, write and execute by issuing the following command:

sudo chmod -R g+xrw /usr/lib/lazarus.

I have also posted the presentation slides for the people that attended the presentation. The slides can be found here.

Please, let me know if you experience any problems with the VM.