[lazarus] Windows binary of Lazarus available

[Michael A. Hess]

Greetings,

Since there was another request for a Windows binary of Lazarus I
decided to build one. It STILL has the problem with the repainting of
the SpeedButtons. This takes a large portion of the processing time and
resources since it repaints these images over and over again.

However there is a trick you can use to at least see some of Lazarus
working. The simple trick is to cover the SpeedButtons with another
window. This will at least free up some of the processing to allow the
other windows, menu bar, etc. to paint. This of course limits what you
can do with the IDE but it does show that the IDE would indeed be
working if we could get around the repaint issue. It appears as though
it is something that is incorrect in the Win32 implementation of GTK+.
Maybe someone can take the binary and do some debug tracing to determine
where this problem occurs. If we could just get someone to work on that
and find that problem a Win32 version of Lazarus would be usable (as
much as it is completed of course).

When running the IDE take another window either the DOS window that is
opened or a Notepad window or something like that and make sure it
covers all of the SpeedButtons. Then just cause some refresh requests on
the other windows by bringing windows in front and then moving them
behind a given window the other windows of the IDE will eventually get
some cycles to paint.

Anyway here is the URL for the Win32 binary of Lazarus

  ftp://lazarus.freepascal.org/lazarus/lazarusw32.zip

You can either install this right into your c:/pp directory, which will
place the .exe into the c:/pp/bin/win32 directory and the units into the
c:/pp/units/win32 directory, or you can unzip them into a separate
Lazarus directory. If you place them into a separate directory you will
then need to modify the ppc386.cfg file to include the search path for
units to this new location.

Please report any feedback or fixes you might come up with.
-- 
==== Programming my first best destiny! ====

Michael A. Hess      Miracle Concepts, Inc.
mhess at miraclec.com   http://www.miraclec.com