Lazarus will not run

[JazzMan]

I have many years of experience in Windows development, but am completely new to Mac. I need to port a large Delphi project to Mac and is very enthusiastic about the development of Lazarus and especially the native possibilites with Qt and Carbon.

Now I am trying to make Lazarus work on my iMac. There have been many problems, which I all managed to solve by reading this forum and the Wiki.

I managed to make Lazarus run once, but now it will no longer run:
* When I go to "/usr/local/share/lazarus" in the Xterm and type "lazarus", the message is "command not found"
* When I double-click lazarus in Xfolders (the NC clone), I see the Lazarus splash screen for about 1/10 sec, then X11 shows up and nothing else happens.

What went wrong. How can I make Lazarus work again?

Best regards,
Hans

Some background info about my installation procedure:
I have an Intel iMac and installed the 386 snapshots from 20070621. Today I installed the 20070625 snapshots on top of them, but it did not solve the problem.
I have installed Xcode, X11 and Fink.
Running "sudo /sw/bin/apt-get install gtk+ gdk-pixbuf" gave a couple of error messages, but after making a manual rebuild in FinkCommander (also with a lot of message), I managed to run Lazarus.
I tried to compile an empty project but got an error message about .app not found. Then I closed Lazarus and added the X11 tips about wm_click, quit_alert and the application shortcut in X11.
Next time i tried to start Lazarus it would not run.

[Vincent Snijders]

On *nix the current directory is not on the path. So if you type lazarus and the lazarus executable is in the current directory it won't start.

Use ./lazarus.

[felipemdc]

further, I recomend that you use the subversion Lazarus. since the last stable release various fixes were made that make using lazarus on Mac OS X much easier. Not to mention that Carbon and Qt interfaces are contantly under improvement.

download lazarus using subversion to your local user folder and do a: make clean all

And then, to run it: ./lazarus

Ah, run that last command from inside a X11 Terminal, not just from any terminal that comes with Mac OS.

[Phil]

further, I recomend that you use the subversion Lazarus. since the last stable release various fixes were made that make using lazarus on Mac OS X much easier. Not to mention that Carbon and Qt interfaces are contantly under improvement.

Looks like he's using a recent snapshot (20070625).

There may be a number of problems that you're reporting.

The .app not found probably relates to the new Use Application Bundle, which is checked by default on the Project Options' Application page.

You could try reinstalling everything. I generally don't install one snapshot over another. See this link for uninstall instructions:

http://wiki.lazarus.freepascal.org/OS_X_Programming_Tips

You can rename the /sw folder that fink creates and try downloading GTK again.

Thanks.

[JazzMan]

Thank you, it works. I feel so stupid that I ommited ./ in my subsequent attempts :-)
I think it confused me that the Applications shortcut for Lazarus I created in X11 did not work (and it still doesn't).

Anyway, I will probably have more questions as I move further. I have to decide soon in which direction I should move.
Right now I am very keen on the Lazarus/Carbon combination, which seem to be the only way to create real native OS X applications?
(I dont like the idea of Qt requiring the user to install a lot of "garbage" in addition to my program, but it is of course a trade off if Qt could save me 6 month of work :-)

Best regards

[felipemdc]

Installing garbage is not the problem about Qt. You can distribute Qt dll inside your app bundle so the user will never notice them (except for some 5MB more in your software size).

The real problem is that you can only use Qt for GPL software, unless you buy a very expensive Qt licence.

[JazzMan]

Ok, that is interesting. When Qt can be distributed as a dll (is it called .dylib on a mac?), then I suppose it is also possible to link Qt into the FPC program file also?
(IIRC Delphi can link C++ compiled units)

I managed to compile and run a test Carbon application from the IDE, so everything seem to work. The Carbon interface has fantastic possibilities, so I really hope it can be finished soon.

Best regards.

[felipemdc]

Ok, that is interesting. When Qt can be distributed as a dll (is it called .dylib on a mac?), then I suppose it is also possible to link Qt into the FPC program file also?

Yes, that is possible, but no-one worked on doing that so far.

(IIRC Delphi can link C++ compiled units)

And the GNU Linker we use on many platforms can also do it. The CodeWarrior linker I use on Symbian is also capable of this.