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View Full Version : Openions on best Linux distro for FPC and Lazarus?



jdarling
12-10-2006, 01:09 PM
I'm just curious what distro's everyone is successfully using FPC and/or lazarus under. I'm getting ready to re-build my box, and I think its time to upgrade from Mandrake BlackIce (seeing as how it doesn't even exist any more). Seems the Mandrake people decided that its better for everyone to pay for the extended OS features :(.

I've herd quite a few people here at work talking about Arch Linux, anyone played with it? I know that Red Hat is a common term, but I've never been a fan (I know Mandrake a Red Hat 5.1, or was it 4.2 were the same thing).

Anyways, whats everyones openion?

grudzio
12-10-2006, 02:00 PM
Well, I am using Mandriva (former Mandrake ) and I am happy with it. FPC works OK. Installing Lazarus is quite troublesome - I had same problems as described in this thread (http://www.pascalgamedevelopment.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=3490). Tons of additional libraries to install, so I lost my patience. I don't know how it is with other distros.

technomage
12-10-2006, 06:13 PM
Im using Gentoo. Takes a bit more work to get up and running, but it's worth the effort.

the Portage package system is the best I have used, sorts out dependancies and compiles everything from source , Portage has entires for FPC and Lazarus.

cragwolf
12-10-2006, 07:08 PM
I use Zenwalk (http://www.zenwalk.org), which is based on the Slackware distribution. It uses a one-app-for-one-task philosophy, default desktop environment is XFCE, although it's easy enough to use KDE, Gnome and Fluxbox on it. Lean and fast. They're switching to the gslapt system for updating their software packages (they have a central repository), currently use a script-based system called netpkg (which I rather like). You can install Slackware packages, too. Has all the libraries that a typical developer would like.

WILL
13-10-2006, 01:43 AM
Wow, it's amasing how many varried responses you get to flavours of Linux. I myself am partial to Debian. (Tries to stick to standard Linux conventions, but also has the very stable and dependable DEB packaging system.)

Of course, I'm not on a Linux box at this time, but I want to keep up to date on how Lazarus installs on Debian as I will one day return to it.

paul_nicholls
13-10-2006, 02:05 AM
At some stage I am planning on trying Lazarus under Ubuntu once I have installed Ubuntu :)

cheers,
Paul.

michalis
13-10-2006, 03:47 AM
I use Debian (some reasons: excellent package system, including painless upgrades, and includes a zilion of packages, including all popular GUI environments, libs, etc.).

But bear in mind that my FPC setup is a little unusual:
- Many FPC versions "switchable" by symlinks, some of them stable like 2.0.2 and 2.0.4 and some regularly updated and recompiled from FPC SVN (trunk and fixes_2_0).
- Lazarus versions "switchable" by symlinks --- the stable one (compiled from tar.gz sources) and the one from SVN trunk.

I don't think that there really is a distro that is "better" or "worse" suited for FPC --- every distro has some lag between FPC releases and when it gets packaged for this distro. And FPC and Lazarus are trying to not be tied to any particular distribution, so they don't have any special needs.

In other words: just choose the Linux distribution that you consider "best" in general.

marcov
14-10-2006, 10:54 AM
Slackware if you like it simple or Fedora if you like it complicated.

FreeBSD if you just want a good distro and OS, and don't need the penguin