New screenshots

Windows 7

Windows 2008 server

Ubuntu Linux 10.10

Screenshot: Lazarus on Linux

Above, Lazarus 0.9.30-0 + FPC 2.4.2 editing Rednaxel's ERP, RNGE 3, running on Windows XP (32-bit). Below, the same screenshot -- same project, same source code -- taken on Ubuntu 10.10 (32-bit).

Lazarus 0.9.30 released

The Lazarus team is glad to announce the 0.9.30 release. This release
is based on fpc 2.4.2.

This release is available for download at the SourceForge download page:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/lazarus/files/

Minimum requirements:
Windows: 98, 2k, Vista, 7, 32 or 64bit
FreeBSD/Linux: gtk 2.8 or qt4.5, 32 or 64bit
Mac OS X: 10.4, LCL only 32bit, non LCL apps can be 64bit

News from the front - again

The phasing out of the 2.x version (Delphi7) has begun. Version 3.0 (Lazarus) is being deployed and for a while both versions will co-exist. The main module of the new version is the NFe (Nota Fiscal Eletrônica - electronic invoice in XML according brazilian government specifications) module.

The "price check" terminal mentioned in a former post was incorporated to RNGE3. Right now we're developing the next-generation SCM (Supply Chain Management) module; instead of a mere port, it's a major overhaul. We'll read the supplier's invoice directly from his NFe's XML, saving a huge time in the inventory control process.

Installing Lazarus on Ubuntu 10.10

We are back! Now the OPF was fully ported to Zeoslib (sqldb had some issues) and the Terminal de Consulta (Price Verifier) is being adapted. It's running on Linux machines for months now, it was a great field test. We started to use Ubuntu 10.10 here and today I made a clean install. Here's the steps to create a Lazarus development machine:

1. Install Ubuntu 10.10 Desktop
   
2. Install FPC 2.4.0 (with Synaptic or apt-get install fpc)
3. Download FPC sources (I prefer the .tar.gz file) to $HOME
   
4. Uncompress them (tar -xvzf fpc-2.4.0.source.tar.gz)
5. Install SVN software (sudo apt-get install subversion)
6. Get Lazarus (svn co http://svn.freepascal.org/svn/lazarus/trunk lazarus)
7. Build Lazarus with extra components (cd lazarus; make bigide)

If you need database connectivity, I suggest you use Zeoslib instead of the bundled sqldb component. Zeos is very mature and stable, to install it on Lazarus there are some extra steps:

1. Get Zeos (svn checkout svn://zeos.firmos.at/zeos/trunk zeosdbo)
2. Install Zeos (open zcomponent.lpk from Components/Open Package)

We also use Synapse library and ACBr components, both from SVN.

News from the front

We decided to postpone the port until the main development of the current version was over, probably in the second semester of 2010. The next major version will be written entirely in Lazarus, using our updated Code Generator with the updated Data Model -- that's being upgraded to support the forthcoming features.

The current version is written in Delphi 7 on a Windows XP virtual machine and runs smoothly under Wine at 100+ Ubuntu boxes. There's a need for a Windows version too, as some customers are still Microsoft-only. Even the customers that moved to Linux still have some Windows boxes for some specific tasks (like Internet Banking).

There's a small module that's been written in Lazarus to test the Persistence Framework and the overall development and deployment. We had to set up ANOTHER virtual machine, this time with Ubuntu 32 bit, to build the application. We need to compile 3 times: Windows XP, Ubuntu 32 and Ubuntu 64. I've tried to set up a cross compiler but it was easier to use another VM.

Lazarus 0.9.28

It was released today, check the Release Notes. Lots of improvements and bugfixes, congratulations to everyone involved.