[Lazarus] Newcomers with Debian based systems

[David Emerson]

> It also should work for other systems. Some time ago I could install 
> Lazarus from RPM's on openSuse, so why not on Ubuntu from DEB
> packages? 

I've been using fpc and debian stable for several years now. I used to 
download the debs from the freepascal website because the debian stable 
repo didn't have them. Then fpc made it into debian stable and I used 
that for a while. Then I wanted an up-to-date version so I switched to 
the debian unstable repo just for free pascal, and I still use that.

Nowadays I use the hu.freepascal.org repo for lazarus, although I've 
been considering going svn on that one. Hasn't happened yet. You can 
add this line to /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb http://www.hu.freepascal.org/lazarus/ lazarus-stable universe

Unfortunately the hu.fpc repo doesn't have fpc 2.4 yet; only fpc 
2.2.4 -- but if you're happy with 2.2.4 for now then go for it, this is 
probably your best solution. One time there was a bug in the declared 
package dependencies so I couldn't upgrade properly, but it got fixed 
after not too long.

I'm not sure what the state of ubuntu's repos are wrt fpc, but debian's 
unstable repo keeps up to date fairly well. It's usually not long after 
a new fpc version announcement that it becomes available on debian 
unstable. I would expect the ubuntu repo to keep fairly up to date as 
well but I don't really know what they do.

~David.