Best linux to develop Lazarus?

[CaptBill]

Very informative thread, seriously. Thanks all.

So it looks like...

Sabayon(Gentoo) for easy install,(pre-compiled Gentoo=faster builds)
ArchLinux for intermediate advanced,(much like Sabayon ,another 'flavor' of Gentoo)
Gentoo gives ultimate advanced control.

with notable mentions....

Chakra,(KDE4 support)
Puppy (for best virtualbox support)

Does that sound about right?

[99Percent]

Tried ArchLinux... what a joke, severely disappointed.

Installing in Virtualbox fails with a downright idiotic bug ("ask_number $3 must be a number!" when assigning virtual memory space)

I tried registering in the forum and it asks a ridiculous script question:

What is the output of "date -u +%W$(uname)|sha256sum|sed 's/\W//g'"?

Seriously, is that is how they get new users to their OS?

[99Percent]

Needless to say, if I am going to try out a linux distro, it must work on Virtualbox right off the bat. Puppy Linux and ArchLinux failed miserably.

[tonyw]

I am discovering Ubuntu is not really very developer friendly and it seems more focused toward the desktop user.

what does not exist for developers in ubuntu?

Its been several months since Lazarus 0.9.30 stable has been release and nobody has updated the Ubuntu repository for it. Its a big hassle to manually install it. You need to install a lot of development packages. Sudo is a pain, clearly not meant to be used so regularly because like I said Ubuntu is geared to the desktop user.

I tried Puppy Linux yesterday, and it is not well supported by Virtualbox.

I am going to give ArchLinux a try.

I am really very surprised to read that anyone thinks that Ubuntu is not an excellent environment for Lazarus development. However, from the above discussion, it does look like the problem is the installation deb files rather than Ubuntu itself. I always install from source for Lazarus and deb files for FPC and that is the way I would recommend using it.

The following is how I install under Ubuntu:

1. Download the fpc (2.4.2 at present) deb files to some temporary location (e.g. /tmp).

2. From the command line cd to that location (e.g. cd /tmp) and enter:

sudo dpkg -i fp*.deb

and then

sudo apt-get -f install

The first command should install Free Pascal and the second will fix any missing dependencies. You may want to do "sudo apt-get update" first if its been a while since your system was updated.

3. Download the lazarus source and decompress the archive into some location (e.g create a directory called lazarus in your home directory).

4. cd to that directory and enter

make

followed by

sudo make install

That should build lazarus and install it under /usr/local

[eny]

I am really very surprised to read that anyone thinks that Ubuntu is not an excellent environment for Lazarus development. However, from the above discussion, it does look like the problem is the installation deb files rather than Ubuntu itself. I always install from source for Lazarus and deb files for FPC and that is the way I would recommend using it.

This was my final straw to get it working a while ago and to my big surprise it did 
Installing FPC (now 2.4.4) works with the deb packages.
Installing Lazarus from the deb packages (if you can find them) fails in all sorts of horrible ways.
However downloading the lazarus source package and compiling it manually works perfectly.

[bobo]

I am also using Ubuntu for Lazarus developments (using Ubuntu 10.10 updated from the 10.04LTS version). Not gonna upgrade to 11.04 as it seems too raw at the moment, plus everything works right now, so why should I.

Compiling both FPC and Lazarus from the SVN sources. It is not a trivial task to do it at first, but once done you are good forever.
New versions/updates to the latest are as easy as running "svn update dirname" and rebuild, for both FPC and Lazarus.

I also had problems with the pre-packaged FPC/Lazarus that is why I made it work this way.

[99Percent]

Tried ArchLinux... what a joke, severely disappointed.

Installing in Virtualbox fails with a downright idiotic bug ("ask_number $3 must be a number!" when assigning virtual memory space)

I tried registering in the forum and it asks a ridiculous script question:

What is the output of "date -u +%W$(uname)|sha256sum|sed 's/\W//g'"?

Seriously, is that is how they get new users to their OS?

Ok, more sober now LOL. I discovered my install mistake for ArchLinux (was assigning all the virtual disk to the boot, leaving zero for the rest) and was able to install it. I take back my initial impresion, I think its a great distro now. Also I solved the forum question. Just copy and paste into a linux command prompt and then copy and paste the resulting md5 string.

[99Percent]

I am also using Ubuntu for Lazarus developments (using Ubuntu 10.10 updated from the 10.04LTS version). Not gonna upgrade to 11.04 as it seems too raw at the moment, plus everything works right now, so why should I.

Compiling both FPC and Lazarus from the SVN sources. It is not a trivial task to do it at first, but once done you are good forever.
New versions/updates to the latest are as easy as running "svn update dirname" and rebuild, for both FPC and Lazarus.

I also had problems with the pre-packaged FPC/Lazarus that is why I made it work this way.

Yeah, except it gets extra complicated if you use third party components. Don't you need to export the SVN version to another directory before compiling it? I agree that SVN lazarus is the way to go for serious development.

[fabienwang]

Don't you need to export the SVN version to another directory before compiling it? I agree that SVN lazarus is the way to go for serious development.

Of course you don't need to export the SVN, you can compile directly on it

[bobo]

You don't need to export anything. The "make clean" and "make install" takes care of the cleanup and proper installation to the proper directories.

As for third party components, they are also getting recompiled when you first start up Lazarus after a new build and Lazarus complains about the missing packages. You just need to click Tools->Rebuild Lazarus and it will get the third party components to the component bar when finished.

[marcov]

I'm curious too. What about the Gentoo approach? Is it the only distro that isn't a flavor?
...
Is Gentoo worth the extra effort in Lazarus picture?

Not really. The only real benefit of Gentoo is the big amount of packages (but Debian has almost as many). The Gentoo ebuild system allows defining and configuring the sources in a flexible way.
A female geek (yes!) in our engineering school claimed that Gentoo is the only distro flexible enough for her. She has many distros around but they restrict her too much.
I haven't noticed that myself but maybe I am just not geeky enough. Years ago I tried to install Gentoo but failed which kind of proves it.

If you like gentoo "build packages" principle, better directly try  the real thing directly, FreeBSD.