Book Image

Getting Started with Lazarus IDE

By : Roderick Person
1 (1)
Book Image

Getting Started with Lazarus IDE

1 (1)
By: Roderick Person

Overview of this book

A good integrated development environment can be the key to creating and delivering software on time and budget. Having a programming language and a development environment that runs on multiple platforms greatly eases and lessens the time taken on creating cross-platform applications. An IDE that is compatible with a legacy code base allows developers to leverage existing libraries in future applications."Getting Started with Lazarus" is a practical, hands-on guide that provides you with a number of clear step-by-step exercises, which will help you take advantage of the power of the Lazarus IDE and Free Pascal to develop software that can be created for cross-platform use."Getting started with Lazarus" discusses developing software with the open source cross platform integrated development environment and the Free Pascal language. We'll learn how to install Lazarus on various platforms such as Linux and Windows, as well as how to create new projects and convert existing Delphi projects to Lazarus projects by learning the differences between Delphi's Pascal syntax and Free Pascal's Object Pascal using a real world example project. We'll learn how to create custom components for use in Lazarus. We'll also learn the basics of documenting a Lazarus project using the Lazarus Documentation Editor. Finally we will learn that the IDE can be rebuilt using a different widget type, specifically GTK 2. Teach yourself the basics of programming with Lazarus and the open source IDE for the Free Pascal language.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)
Getting Started with the Lazarus IDE
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Configuring the Lazarus development environment


After a successful installation of Lazarus and Free Pascal, it may be necessary to set up a few environmental settings so Lazarus can function correctly. Start Lazarus on the initial start up. You may see the informational error notifying that Lazarus cannot find the Free Pascal source directory. To correct this, open the Lazarus IDE Options dialog which looks like the screenshot that follows. The IDE Options dialog is accessed under the Environment menu and the Options submenu.

When you initially access this dialog, you can see that the FPC source directory textbox is empty, click the ellipse button and enter the source directory path.

For Linux/BSD, enter the following:

/usr/local/src/FPC

For Windows, the IDE Options menu is located under the Tools menu. The default Free Pascal source folder is c:\lazarus\fpc\2.6.0\source.

If you did not install Lazarus using the defaults, choose the folder in which you installed Lazarus.

Another import option that is not set in the Linux version is the debugger. To access the debugger settings, scroll down in the left window of the Options menu and select Debugger. In the right window pane, select the drop-down box with the heading Debugger type and path. Select the GNU Debugger (gdb) option. Once selected, the path should populate itself.