[Lazarus] Linux

[Hans-Peter Diettrich]

cc_ at freemail.hu schrieb:

> I have never used Linux before, but it is becoming an important 
> development target platform for us now. After installing Ubuntu 8.1 with 
> gnome desktop I was quite surprised that the user interface felt quite 
> slugish. The same machine with XP works as expected. It is hard to 
> believe for me that Linux would be any slower than XP.

Most machines ship with special Windows drivers, starting from the 
chipset and reaching to the graphics card. Actually I cannot make work 
properly an XP from a distribution for a different machine, lacking the 
appropriate drivers for the new machine. The new machine only comes with 
Vista drivers, support even for other Windows versions is poor to non 
existent. The same for Linux distros, which may not include the machine 
specific drivers.

I found XP very hardware dependent, since I've had to replace the 
graphics card on an older machine - XP now fails to start even in safe 
or VGA mode. A W2K installation on the same machine had no problems to 
switch to the new hardware.

> - Is there a way to speed up Ubuntu? (drivers, other GUI ...) (:Yes, I 
> know it is not a Lazarus specific question:)

You should make sure that all required drivers are available for your 
favorite system, *before* buying a new machine. Lazarus cannot make the 
OS work faster ;-)

Or you install the host system, as shipped with the machine, and run 
other systems in virtual machines. Then you can find out how other 
systems behave on your machine, without hardware dependencies. You also 
have a chance to e.g. test your applications on different target 
systems. I create a new VM for every major software project, so that I 
can save and restore the project together with the entire environment. 
No more problems with multiple FPC/Lazarus or Delphi versions, when each 
development system is installed in a dedicated VM :-)

DoDi