Chapter 2 Installing Lazarus

By Jrg Braun, Swen Heinig and Felipe Monteiro de Carvalho

Naturally, you have to install Lazarus before you can use it, just as you do for other programs of any complexity. Although the operating system that Lazarus runs on does not significantly affect how you work with Lazarus, there are some differences in the installation procedure on different platforms. Consequently, in this chapter we describe separate Lazarus installation procedures for the most commonly used operating systems. If you work on another operating system, you should first check the Lazarus and Free Pascal websites to find out whether it is possible to install Lazarus on your system. If it is, the instructions given here will help to guide you. If you have any problems, you may be able to obtain further help from the Lazarus forum or the mailing list. Without doubt, Lazarus is most often installed under Windows, perhaps because an erstwhile Delphi user wants to develop 64-bit Windows programs or program for the Windows CE platform, or because he's reluctant to pay for expensive annual updates with perhaps few benefits. Furthermore, anyone who is considering switching and first wants to get a feel for Lazarus is better off to install it first under the operating system they are used to, rather than embarking on the adventure of trying out both a new operating system and a new development environment at the same time. Compared with other platforms, Lazarus under Windows also has a major advantage if you are a user with a Delphi background: you can continue to use many Delphi components with few (if any) changes. Certainly, there is much more to consider when you start developing truly cross-platform software with the LCL than when you simply move from Delphi to Lazarus on Windows. So this chapter begins by describing how to install Lazarus under Microsoft Windows. It does not matter whether you are using Windows 2000, XP, Vista, 7, or one of the server versions. Lazarus runs stably on all these platforms. In principle you can install different Lazarus versions in parallel, each in its own directory. However, the installed versions may interfere with each other. Eliminating the interference takes a certain amount of effort, so installing a different version on a virtual machine is usually a simpler solution. There are basically three versions of Lazarus that you can install, including under Windows: the official stable version a current daily snapshot an SVN repository with the current source files 62
Lazarus - the complete guide

2.1.1 Installing TortoiseSVN

Figure 2.1: Only the basic package is necessary for anonymous download from the SVN directories; the dictionaries and supplementary packages are not required

The command-line program svn is available for Linux, BSD, MacOS X and Windows. In Unix derivatives, it is installed as part of the subversion program package using the system's package management utility. This package contains a very large number of programs, most of which are not needed for anonymous downloading of extracts from a repository. In fact, only the svn program is needed for this purpose. The source archive can also be obtained from subversion.apache.org (formerly http://subversion.tigris.org), but there is no real need to compile the programs from the source. It is also necessary to resolve dependencies, as described in the info file of the FreeBSD port shown in Figure 2.2.

2.1.2 The Subversion package

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