Lazarus on Raspberry Pi
The Raspberry Pi is a credit-card-sized single-board computer. It has been developed in the UK by the Raspberry Pi Foundation with the intention of stimulating the teaching of basic computer science in schools. Raspberry Pis are also used for multiple other purposes that are as different as media servers, robotics and control engineering.
The Raspberry Pi Foundation recommends Raspbian Wheezy as standard operating system. However, alternative systems including RISC OS and various Linux distributions, even Android, may be used.
Lazarus runs natively under the Raspbian operating system.
Installing and compiling Lazarus
Simple installation under Raspbian
In the Raspbian OS it is easy to install Lazarus and Free Pascal. In order to do this simply open a terminal window and type:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo apt-get install fpc
sudo apt-get install lazarusThis installs a precompiled version of Lazarus on the Raspberry Pi. Of course, a network connection is required. Installation may take about 30 minutes, but major portions of this process take place automatically. After installation you may instantly start Lazarus via the LXDE development menu.
Compiling from sources
You may want to compile Lazarus from subversion sources. See Michell Computing: Lazarus on the Raspberry Pi for details.
Accessing external hardware
One of the goals in the development of Raspberry Pi was to facilitate effortless access to external devices like sensors and actuators. One way to use this capability is Alex Schaller's wrapper unit for Gordon Henderson Arduino compatible wiringPi library.
