I tried Kubuntu, but I could not get on with the user interface, the garish icons, the childish animated cursors, the awful file manager with a strange name, some odd editor called Kate... So I got Xandros, a Linux distribution that looks as if it has been designed by and for grown-ups.
I downloaded the Lazarus deb and the FPC tar.gz of debs and began installing them. But I hit a problem when I got to fp-units-gfx because this depended on libggi-dev and libgd-dev which were nowhere to be found, even in the "unsupported" Debian repository that I added to the package manager.
Eventually I found that I could overcome this problem by running apt-get -f install, which managed to fix the dependencies and install the missing packages. But I have hit a brick wall with fp-units-net. This requires libdbus-1-dev which is not available in the Xandros repository. I found it at debian, but when I configure the package manager to look there apt-get says it is going to have to remove all the Xandros desktop software that would effectively break the distribution.
If I forget about fp-units-net and install Lazarus, then despite the errors, an entry is created for it in the programs menu and when I click it Lazarus runs! However, apt-get -f install wants to remove it!
When I try to compile a simple "hello world" it fails with "Can't find unit URIParser used by XMLRead." I take back everything bad I ever said about Bill Gates!
After a bit more faffing around uninstalling the Laz deb I finally managed to get it to compile. Yay! BUT, my package manager is now completely broken and apt-get -f install wants to remove both fp-units-net and lazarus to fix it. Obviously, I don't want to do that now that it seems to work, but I can't install anything else on my system. Any ideas?
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