[Lazarus] The perfect Linux distro for FPC and Lazarus development

[Graeme Geldenhuys]

Hi,

I have been using Ubuntu since its inception. But recently I found that 
I have to install lots of extra packages just to compile a GTK2 or Qt 
application. Out of the box, Ubuntu cannot compile and link a program 
written with FPC either. Same problems with using Lazarus IDE, or even 
trying to compile the Lazarus IDE itself. A similar problem occurs if 
you trying and compile the latest version of some Linux tool. eg: 
Flamerobin (a Firebird DB GUI admin tool). With the latter, I get APT 
package versions clashes, or it pulls in lots of unnecessary dependencies.

I thought I would try my all time favourite distro, which I haven't used 
in years - Slackware. I downloaded Slackware 13.1 (64-bit), and tried it 
in a "safe" VM session first, before I committed to installing it as my 
primary OS.

What a joy! Out of the box I can compile FPC, Lazarus and any of my 
applications using FPC or Lazarus. I can even built the FPC 
documentation because Slackware includes all the LaTeX tools. I can also 
grab pretty much any Linux project from SourceForge and do a 
'./configure', 'make' and 'make install' and it works!

So if you want to use a Linux distro that just works out of the box _for 
programming_, I would highly recommend Slackware. It's easy to install, 
update and configure. Comes with a boat load of handy HOWTO documents 
etc. And most importantly, it comes preloaded with everything a software 
developer needs to get their work done.

Regards,
   - Graeme -

-- 
fpGUI Toolkit - a cross-platform GUI toolkit using Free Pascal
http://fpgui.sourceforge.net/