Building Lazarus Ide With Free Pascal For FatDog64

This is a summary of how to build the Lazarus Ide on FatDog64. It will make a Pascal Ide that builds quickly, has a form designer, an integrated debugger and a great big class library full of components like buttons, image controls, menus, edits etc... Windows programmers will know a very similar thing called Delphi but this will put the 64 bit Free Pascal compiler and Ide on your FatDog64.

Note! This entire topic also applies to building Lazarus for Puppy Linux. Just requires a 32 bit build of Free Pascal that you can get from here.

FatDog64 running Lazarus in design mode! Click to enlarge.

1) Check if you have Free Pascal on your FatDog64.  Type "fpc" in a terminal. If fpc is installed then you have fpc. Check the version. It should be at least 2.6.x I recommend 2.6.2. If you do not have Lazarus or your version is to old, then get this sfs file for Free Pascal 2.6.2 for FatDog64, or if you are in the future then read these instructions on how to make your own sfs of Free Pascal for FatDog64. Whatever you do, you must have a working fpc on your system.

2) Once you have a working fpc, then to put Lazarus on FatDog64 is just a matter of compiling it. Fortunately this is Pascal and not C++. Normally compiling large packages can take a long time but with Pascal it takes a minute or five depending on your Pc.

3) Download the Lazarus source code from http://sourceforge.net/projects/lazarus/?source=directory. I used version 1.0.10. Unzip it into a folder. When downloading code for Linux I recommend to always get the tar.gz or tar.bz2 file if there are different types of zip file.Just because some distributions of code like to format the line endings differently and will not tell you about that if the code is available as a zip and a tar.bz2 or a tar.gz.

4)With Lazarus you cannot build from the same source code to different binary targets, so you need a separate folder of the source code for each different type of Puppy Linux. So if you have five different Puppy Linux installed on one hard disk but they are all 32 bit then you only need one lazarus source code folder, but to build for FatDog64 and for normal 32 bit Puppy Linux you will need two different Lazarus folders.

In short the Lazarus source code folder is also the Lazarus build output folder, and therefore is also the Lazarus program folder etc...

5) Also it is a very good idea to put the Free Pascal source code in a directory next to your Lazarus directory. Do this before building Lazarus, so that once lazarus is built it will start and ask you where the Free Pascal source code is. Then you can just point to the directory of files and Lazarus will be happy. On my system I put the lazarus code into f:\lazarus64, I append 64 since that will be my lazarus build for FatDog64, and then I have one source code folder of the Free Pascal 2.6.2 code in F:\fpc-2.6.2 which is where lazarus can find files from, and then I reboot to Linux to do the actual compiling. If you want to build also a version for 32 bit Puppy Linux later then make another lazarus folder called lazarus32 and then both the builds in lazarus32 and lazarus64 can point to the same source code.

6) Now build the thing. Just go into the Lazarus code directory, open a terminal and type "make clean bigide". This will build it quickly compared to C++ packages and then just click the newly created file called "lazarus". The lazarus will start and it will ask you where the Free Pascal source directory is. You really do need to tell it so that Lazarus can work properly.

Versions
I specifically used the following files for this...
1) Free Pascal .sfs is made from fpc-2.6.2.x86_64-linux.tar, but you will not need this file because you can just download the Free Pascal sfs file, unless you want to build your own sfs file then read this topic.
Click here to download the sfs file and then install it on FatDog64. After that it is trivial to build the lazarus code.
3) lazarus-1.0.10-0.tar.gz - This file can be download from here. If you think that 1.0.10 is outdated by the time you read this then do try the newer version if you feel like it, but this was tested with 1.0.10 and it works great. Note how I specify the tar.gz file, this is important, because when downloading code for linux and they offer zip and also tar.gz formats it means that the zip is formatted with windows line endings and the tar.gz is formatted for linux line endings.

FatDog64 running Lazarus in runtime mode. Click to enlarge.