Before Installation : Requirements

Hardware requirements

The compiler needs at least one of the following processors:

1. An Intel 80386 or higher processor. A coprocessor is not required, although it will slow down your program’s performance if you do floating point calculations without a coprocessor, since emulation will be used.

2. An AMD64 or EMT64 processor.

3. A PowerPC processor. (32 or 64 bit)

4. A SPARC processor

5. An ARM processor (32 or 64 bit).

6. Older FPC versions exist for the motorola 68000 processor, but these are no longer maintained.

Memory and disk requirements:

The memory and disk requirements vary from platform to platform. One should count in the order of 100 megabytes for a basic installation; 2 Gigabytes should be counted if you want to recompile the compiler and all basic packages.

Software requirements

Under DOS

The DOSdistribution contains all the files you need to run the compiler and compile Pascal programs.

Under UNIX

Under Unixsystems (such as Linux) you need to have the following programs installed :

1. GNUas, the GNUassembler.

2. GNUld, the GNUlinker.

3. Optionally (but highly recommended) : GNUmake. For easy recompiling of the compiler and Run-Time Library, this is needed.

Under Windows

The Windowsdistributions (both 32 and 64 bit) contain all the files you need to run the compiler and compile Pascal programs. However, it may be a good idea to install the mingw32 tools or the cygwin development tools. Links to both of these tools can be found on http://www.freePascal.org

Under OS/2

While the Free Pascaldistribution comes with all necessary tools, it is a good idea to install the EMX extender in order to compile and run programs with the Free Pascal compiler.

Under Mac OS X

Mac OS X 10.1 or higher is required, and the developer tools or XCode must be installed. The installer contains the necessary instructions.