Quote Originally Posted by WILL
If you are basing your choice of Linux distrubition on Free Pascal/Lazarus, sadly Debian might be the tougher one to get to work.
That's more wrestling with Debian's unusable package system. However getting FPC to run without using apt-* and similar garbage is fairly simple.

I always install FPC on debian using the binary TGZ, and not with apt-* and stuff. (mainly because they break the packages up, and sometimes have useless dependancies).

Moreover, the debian system is out of date half of the time. (like now with 1.9.6)

I also always was able to use FPC easily on Slackware.

I heard of troubles with Gentoo, but that is mainly because they are often customizing glibc,gcc and other libraries a bit too hard, which breaks the binary interface.