[SOLVED] How to install on Debian 8 (Jessie)?

[eny]

Is there an installation procedure for (vanilla) Debian 8 (Jessie) that actually works?

[MathMan]

Hi Eny,

Not sure what exactly you are refering too but I just had a tour de force installing Laz 1.6.4 & FPC 3.0.2 on my Debian system.

Finally understood that there was a recent change towards PIC (Position Independent Code) on the general Linux mainstream. This lead to some changes in the binutils including linker which now understands a new command token. This leads to linker errors if your linker isn't capable of handling this command. The Debian packages on the net seem to all have been build under the new regime while the generic TAR archives from the Laz/FPC maintainers seem to rely on the older scheme.

When I installed the Debian package on my system I first got some error message from the package manager which can be ignored (at least I did without averse effects).

After Installation of FPC sources and Lazarus (which ran without issues) I encountered the linker issue where I actually see two ways to resolve

* update your binutils and regenerate the complete FPC library (if you have the necessary tools like assembler etc.)

* extract the FPC library from the TAR archives and replace the installed FPC library with this

Potentially you have to "sudo" for both (depending on where you installed). I opted for the second and now everything seems to work ok.

Kind regards,
MathMan

[Bart]

I installed on Debian 8 (on a 16 year old computer) by first installing fpc (3.0 at the time) from the tar archive (using the install shell script), then downloading Lazarus sources and doing a make all.
Took a while (512 MB RAM is not very much), but worked without further problems.

Bart

[eny]

Bart, MathMan thx for the feedback.
I'm trying to migrage from Window$ to Debian and getting Lazarus up and running was one of the prerequisites.
No luck so far neither with the 'information' from the Wiki nor with fpcupdeluxe (errors galore).

However Bart's method works like a charm:
- installed fpc 3.0.2 by downloading the 3.0.2 debian LInux package and executing the install script.
- copied the fpc sources to the appropriate location (separate download).
- download the Lazarus src package and build from the command line
- and... Bob's your uncle!

For everyone starting to use Lazarus on Linux for the first time, I would highly recommend this procedure.
Something to add to the Wiki.

The only one problem that remains is Lazarus' over-engineered editor which makes it impossible to select text with Shift-numpad keys (the rest of the OS does work).

But, so far so good.

[update]
Ah finally the 'key grabber' does work in the keys customization menu so the numpad keys can be programmed to behave like they should.
Too bad the default is not the right setting.
But at least there is now a viable  workaround.