[Lazarus] FPC and Lazarus on ARM

[Mark Morgan Lloyd]

Michael Schnell wrote:
> Thanks a lot !
> Great Work.
> 
> I am really astonished to hear that you were to run a graphical desktop 
> on the slug. Could you  elaborate on that a little bit ?

No problem at all, but a note on administration to start with: every 
time one of my (Debian) systems boots, it dumps the list of installed 
packages into RCS so that I can go back later and see what went on when.

Most of the systems around here are set up using a Debian+KDE CD, 
although I might change that policy in view of the mess that is KDE v4. 
I install the basics plus checking the box for a desktop system, later I 
tell it to install gdm since that is the only display manager that 
handles XDMCP properly- there's a dialog(ue) asking whether this is to 
be made the default. I also install a VNC server because some app 
versions (specifically, Lazarus and Mozilla of a couple of years ago) 
are very slow over remote X, this runs via a script hooked into inittab 
(not available on ARM).

Since Debian ARM is a network install getting KDE etc. onto the system 
is fairly expensive in terms of bandwidth, so I tend to do this out of 
hours. Once the system is set up as above I simply add the fluxbox and 
xterm packages, I think there's a dialog(ue) asking whether this is to 
be made the default window manager but in any case there's a gdm option.

That leaves a system with some "extra bits" that I'd rather not have, 
for example there are both Gnome and KDE user administration programs in 
the KDE menu. In the case of ARM you can connect to it via X, if that 
doesn't work check forward and reverse name lookup. I can't remember how 
you add programs for FluxBox- you might need to edit a .ini file.

I'll see if I can work a bit of that detail into the wiki page, but 
right now I'm trying to work on other things and would like to give 
other people an opportunity to hack it around a bit.

As I said earlier, this is slightly moot since I need to bug-report a 
Lazarus IDE problem. I should have done that some time ago but I didn't 
want to rock the boat before I was fairly familiar with the way things 
worked, and to be honest I wasn't expecting a very sympathetic reception 
if the major platform it affected was SPARC :-)

-- 
Mark Morgan Lloyd
markMLl .AT. telemetry.co .DOT. uk

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