LAZARUS
Credit: www.lazarus-ide.org
OUR EXPERT
David Bolton has 30 years of Pascal programming experience under his belt, so knows a thing or two about developing GUI programming applications on Linux and other platforms.
Creating GUI apps in Linux is more complex than making simple apps that run in a terminal. C There are several ways that are mostly GTK-based with C or C++, such as GTK+/C, Qt/C++, FLTK/C++ and WxWidgets/C++. You can also use the Python library PyGObject.
There is another, easier way if you don’t mind learning Pascal. Install Lazarus (see boxout opposite), an IDE that also installs the cross-platform opensource programming language Free Pascal. This lets you create GUI apps visually by dropping icons on a form, setting their properties, then compiling and running the program.
After installing it, you can start Lazarus with the command startlazarus in a terminal. That opens the Lazarus editor. You should see five different windows:
1. The top one is the main window, with the menu and all components and their icons.
2. To the left is the Object Inspector. This shows the properties for the selected component on the Visual form (see 4).
3. The source editor is where you edit the source code of your Pascal application.
4. The gridded window with the title Form1 is the Visual form.
5. A Messages window at the bottom. This shows the compile results.
GUI applications in Free Pascal are made
