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Chapter 2Installing 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 forother programs of any complexity. Although the
operating system that Lazarusruns on does not significantly affect
how you work with Lazarus, there are somedifferences in the
installation procedure on different platforms. Consequently,
in this chapter we describe separate Lazarus installation
procedures for the mostcommonly used operating systems. If you work
on another operating system,you should first check the Lazarus and
Free Pascal websites to find out whether itis 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 obtainfurther help from the Lazarus forum or the mailing
list.
Without doubt, Lazarus is most often installed under Windows,
perhaps because anerstwhile 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 firstwants to get a feel for Lazarus is
better off to install it first under the operating systemthey are
used to, rather than embarking on the adventure of trying out both
a newoperating system and a new development environment at the same
time.Compared with other platforms, Lazarus under Windows also has
a major advantage ifyou are a user with a Delphi background: you
can continue to use many Delphicomponents with few (if any)
changes. Certainly, there is much more to consider whenyou start
developing truly cross-platform software with the LCL than when you
simplymove from Delphi to Lazarus on Windows.
So this chapter begins by describing how to install Lazarus
under Microsoft Windows. Itdoes 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 theinterference takes a
certain amount of effort, so installing a different version on a
virtualmachine is usually a simpler solution.
There are basically three versions of Lazarus that you can
install, including underWindows:
the official stable versiona current daily snapshotan SVN
repository with the current source files
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Figure 2.1: Only the basic package is necessary for anonymous
download from the SVN directories;the dictionaries and
supplementary packages are not required
2.1.1 Installing TortoiseSVN
2.1.2The Subversion packageThe command-line program is available
for Linux, BSD, MacOS X and Windows.In Unix derivatives, it is
installed as part of the program package using thesystem's package
management utility. This package contains a very large number
ofprograms, most of which are not needed for anonymous downloading
of extracts from arepository.
svnsubversion
In fact, only the program is needed for this purpose.The source
archive can also be obtained from (formerly
), 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 fileof the FreeBSD port shown in Figure
2.2.
svnsubversion.apache.org
http://subversion.tigris.org
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