[Lazarus] FPC & Lazarus installation including cross compiling from source

[Marco van de Voort]

On Tue, Mar 27, 2012 at 05:44:37PM +0200, Mattias Gaertner wrote:
> > With Lazarus 1.0 being closer than ever, and with the availability of
> > different Linux scripts to compile FPC from source (including cross
> > compilation), maybe the time has come to have an automated installer
> > that does all that, including the compilation of the cross binutils.
> 
> That is one approach.
> Another is to use VMs.

Too slow. Tried it for FPC release building, but checkout, export + build
takes >40 mins (Core2 6600. Virtualbox with hardware virtualization enabled)

I ended up stacking relative cheap Pentium D boxes (HP office machines,
typically dc7600sff 2.8GHz, 1GB, 80GB hdd for Eur 55-65, inaudible when
idle).  Nobody wants PIV's and derivatives anymore, but the later Pentium D
series have 64-bit capability, DDR2 and sata, so are relatively cheap to
maintain if something breaks down, and the default config is enough for FPC
release building.

Cheap usb KVM, first generation TFT monitor. Whole stack under a table,
relative low on space. 

(all el cheapo since typically only used during release time)

Disclaimer: wife-acceptancy-factor not an issue here.

> VMs are nowadays very easy to setup and they run almost as fast (sometimes
> even faster) as the host system.

Only hypervisors run fast. Anything heterogenous with an image as storage
is quite slow. Slower than 5 year old HW from the dumpster.