free pascal / lazarus

[feverish]

|Addendum: I see the Lazarus version is quoted in the 'About' menu as version 1.1

[DirkS]

|Addendum: I see the Lazarus version is quoted in the 'About' menu as version 1.1

You mentioned that you downloaded the latest trunk, so that's correct.

Gr.
Dirk.

[feverish]

. . . ,. Now to get on with using the new Lazarus.

And if fpc 2.6.2 breaks any hearts,
http://www.lazarus.freepascal.org/index ... v.html#new
may help to retrieve the situation. Here's hoping . . .

[plugwash]

I'm pretty sure upstream 2.6.2 does not have arm hard float support.

[feverish]

Quel domage! Is there any (relatively easy) way for a linux-and-ARM-illiterate-newbie to fight his way through this maze to reasonable success? I have time, if that is the major issue.

It may be the blind leading the blind, but I have been hoping to give a quick demo or two of Raspi to local schoolkids (we're in fairly remote Central America and they suck your brains dry, given half a chance) and it would be preferable to have something I more or less understand that works. (Using pigeon-Spanglish and Kriol for the purpose of the demo, as well as English) I don't want to learn another software language if I can avoid it

[zog]

Hi,
I wouldn't worry to much at the moment about fpc 2.6.2 not supporting hard float at the moment.
I am sure that hard float support will be added in due course.
The key thing is to pick a stable release of lazarus and fpc and stick with them. If you are planning to teach pascal to kids you will need to stick to a stable release. I want to raise the profile of lazarus and pascal within the ras pi community. I am not very happy that we have been relegated to the other languages section. I don't upgraded my commercial compilers every year as you get stuck in a never ending upgrade cycle.
I guess the key way to influence what happens with the free pascal compiler, and lazarus is to donate money to the free pascal and lazarus maintainers - this is the linux way.

[Albion123]

I apologise for causing offence.

I would like to assure you of two matters:
1) I will not now be purchasing, or indeed having any involvement with, the Raspberry Pi
2) I will not be visiting this Forum again, for any reason whatsoever

This is not a decision which I have reached lightly, but since I am clearly not a suitable person to post to this Forum, I feel that no other options are available to me.

[feverish]

I wouldn't worry to much at the moment about fpc 2.6.2 not supporting hard float at the moment.
I am sure that hard float support will be added in due course.

2.6.2 per se actually means little to me . . . . what really concerns me is that I am still so abysmally ignorant and despite hours searching on the web can't find enough jargon-busting info to be able to use Raspi and Lazarus as a tool without having to have encyclopaedic details first about why to do complicated things with linux in order to succeed in what should surely be simple tasks. That's one reason why this topic has been so useful.

One of the first things kids are going to want to know after they get over the cooing phase is why apt-get update and upgrade for instance are so prominently important in the tutorials and forum but when it comes to Lazarus, forget it.

The key thing is to pick a stable release of lazarus and fpc and stick with them.

In my ignorance, I was happy with simply using lazarus 0.9 xxxx as a tool until fpc2.6.0 came around, all the news was about how to get around installing it on the Raspi and then finding it busted what until then had been a work in progress without ready explanation.

I want to raise the profile of lazarus and pascal within the ras pi community. I am not very happy that we have been relegated to the other languages section. [/quote ]
Power to your elbow. I'm 100% with you in that, for what my support may be worth - very little as things stand, I suspect.

[DirkS]

I apologise for causing offence.

I would like to assure you of two matters:
1) I will not now be purchasing, or indeed having any involvement with, the Raspberry Pi
2) I will not be visiting this Forum again, for any reason whatsoever

This is not a decision which I have reached lightly, but since I am clearly not a suitable person to post to this Forum, I feel that no other options are available to me.

Don't think anybody here took any offence from your post.
I merely pointed out that there are other forums where you are more likely to get a solution for your problem...

Gr.
Dirk.

[plugwash]

Note: I have split larryij's post into a new topic at http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewt ... 34&t=37851 as it isn't really related to the topic at hand.

[zog]

Hi,
I have figured out how to build debian packages using dpkg, I have made a rudimentary debian package for lazarus, but I need to add scripts to install / uninstall lazarus, plus do nice things such as place a short cut on the desktop etc. Hopefully I will be able to make an unofficial installer package for versions 1.0.4 & version 1.0.6, although I would prefer these to be produced by the offical lazarus maintainers.

[feverish]

This is a great service for beginners. All power to your elbow. Looking forward to the eventual result. Hopefully, it will install on Raspi256 as well as Raspi512?

[Thaddy]

I'm pretty sure upstream 2.6.2 does not have arm hard float support.

Not quite true. It supports eabihf, i think. And it links to the lowlevel binaries in /opt/vc/lib and it actually works with them. Although it requires a bit of tinkering with the pascal code.
I have working examples with EGL en GLESv2. After clean-up they are available. (Actually, they are available on request with good reasons to test alpha-code)

I think that as far as actually using vfp when appropiate: not (yet).
But I am only using trunk. And even in trunk the defaults for opengl and gles defaults to soft. (easy to fix btw)

[plugwash]

I've just looked and I can't find any evidence of hard float support in 2.6.2.

[Thaddy]

I dont have anything other than trunk on my pi. That definitely supports hf.
In 2.6.2 you had to combine -CpARM with -OpARM and -CfVFPv2 AFAIR. Try fpc -i
Again, I may be wrong. Otherwise bootstrap trunk. I dont think many people will write commercial code on a Pi (although it may very well be production GRADE ) It is ok to use trunk most of the time and build failures or regressions get resolved real quick. Usually within 24 hours of notice or test failures.

Btw: build time for FPC on the pi itself dramatically decreased after I use a SSD to run Raspbian. About 35 minutes instead of an hour.

[feverish]

Some of us (whoever 'us') are , in order to help a bit of self-discipline, are trying to persuade kids to adopt a consistent experimental path:-
Review the current situation;
Choose a path they think might lead to reliable development;
Break down any problems into defined one-at-a-time tasks;
Prioritise the list of tasks;
Perform each task in turn;
Examine the results critically;
Make conclusions;
Make any necessary revisions to help others;
Pass on the information.

It might be of considerable help if anyone with possibly very useful experience, such as the foregoing few messages may prove to be, would take the time to record their important achievements in sufficient detail to encourage the rest of 'us'.

PLEASE!

[Thaddy]

Point taken. I am planning on it

[plugwash]

I dont have anything other than trunk on my pi. That definitely supports hf.
In 2.6.2 you had to combine -CpARM with -OpARM and -CfVFPv2 AFAIR. Try fpc -i

You also need the hard float ABI to make things work correctly on raspbian and there is no support for that in upstream 2.6.x (there is in raspbian's patched 2.6.0)

[feverish]

Point taken. I am planning on it

For which, much thanks.

[Thaddy]

As a token of good faith I finished the header translations for A.J. Starks' elegant little OpenVG library.
Beta available on request, because it needs some documentation since you need armhf and fpc trunk.

[feverish]

It sounds more than a token, though speaking for the most ignorant, like myself, I'll need to wait for the finished article. The more expert, though, may well gobble it up, and perhaps offer some help to completion.

[Thaddy]

Actually, it is not THAT difficult, and once you are done everything is very, very easy.
Basically, my current code depends on two things that I have to document:
1. You should be able to build the C objects based on the instructions from A.J. Starks.
2. You should be able to build the FPC trunk from the - partly broken - instructions from michelcomputing.co.uk

Once that is obtained, the rest is a breeze. But I am doing a topic on it. Not months, only hours or days.
But after the grand prix for sure.

[zog]

Hi,

Note any comments in capitals are instruction for you not the computer.

LAZARUS 1.0.6 EASY INSTALL FOR RASPBIAN WHEEZY

I have finally managed to master making a binary distribution package using dpkg for lazarus version 1.0.6. The package is lazrpi.deb it is for Raspian wheezy. What it does is that it will install Lazarus version 1.0.6 to a raspberry pi computer in /usr/share/lazarus.
Note this is an unofficial binary distribution for the raspberry pi of lazarus version 1.0.6 and fpc source version 2.6.0.
Please install this package to a freshly flashed sd card for testing do not install on an SD card with a prior version of lazarus on it. I haven't tried to install the package on a 256 MB raspberry pi as I broke the SD card on my 256 MB pi.

PLEASE TEST AND COMMENT - WARNING WORK WITH A FRESH DISTRO!
I CAN TAKE NO RESPOSIBILITY FOR DAMAGE OR DATA LOSS (ALTHOUGH THERE SHOULD NOT BE ANY).

DOWNLOAD THE FILE FROM

http://www.filedropper.com/lazrpi


Note the following link will remain indefinetly while people are downloading the file, and it will vanish if no one downloads the file for 30 days

The file is approximately 128 MB in size

MD5 E8637D3A863F4FF09286CBE20A34B39E lazrpi.deb

To install make sure fpc is installed first. The internal package name is rpi-lazarus.
You may upload and seed this file on BitTorrent if you wish or copy to a different distribution system, please distribute these instructions with the package.

The package installs lazarus to /usr/share/lazarus
it creates a group call lazpi. It should create a link in the Programming menu.
Start lazarus set the source code directory to /usr/share/lazarus/fpc/2.6.0 in the dialog when lazarus first starts.

sudo bash
apt-get install fpc
dpkg -i lazrpi.deb

ADD USERS manually to lazpi group

adduser root lazpi
adduser pi lazpi
#EXCETERA, EXCETERA
exit

LOG OUT AND THEN LOG BACK IN AGAIN TO REFRESH OWNERSHIP RIGHTS

To remove the package type

WARNING MAKE SURE YOU HAVE BACKED UP ANY IMPORTANT FILES BEFORE CONTINUING

sudo bash
dpkg -r rpi-lazarus

YOU MAY NEED TO CLEAN UP AND REMOVE
/usr/share/lazarus if you compiled or wrote files in any of the directories in the lazarus directory

to do this

sudo bash
cd /usr/share/lazarus
rm * -r
cd ..
rmdir lazarus

TO DELETE THE lazpi GROUP DO THE FOLLOWING

deluser pi lazpi
deluser root lazpi
#EXCETERA EXCETERA
groupdel lazpi

Good luck I hope this helps if you are struggling to install lazarus 1.0.6 using subversion.

PS I have started work on a web site for lazarus on the raspberry pi. It is a site containing useful links and embed web pages from other sites that might be useful for beginners.

Jack Taylor

[feverish]

Thank you very much for that work. I have a recently-flashed pristine SD with the latest Raspbian, and when I go to the place my Raspi lives, hopefully in a couple of days, I'll try your package and report back.

Also looking forward to seeing your new website

[feverish]

Apologies for failing to follow through. The electric mains here are not the best and following a brown-out and subsequent apt-get update and upgrade, my Raspi's wifi adaptor, on which I relied over there, failed and will no longer scan available network resources. Quite why this might be, and whether or not the mains may be at the root of problems I have no idea at present.
The local shops don't carry such items and it commonly takes weeks on end to have them shipped in from overseas, so it may be some time before I manage to re-establish wifi comms to my Raspi.
Meanwhile, all the best on your own projects..