HI everyone,
I just want to give a heads up that, unfortunately, my main work laptop that I use for Free Pascal development is currently in the repair shop after suffering a hardware failure. I've confirmed that the CPU, hard drive and memory are all functional, but the laptop is flashing diagnostic lights on startup (Caps Lock and Scroll Lock blink) and the machine generally doesn't stay on for very long, usually crashing when it tries to load Windows.
It is most likely a cooling problem such as a broken or disconnected fan and hopefully isn't catastrophic. In the meantime I'm learning to use my Raspberry Pi as a general-purpose computer. I am using both 32-bit ARM and 64-bit AARCH64 (using two separate SD cards), although the latter uses a beta OS. The good news is that I managed to compile FPC on both platforms (as arm-linux and aarch64- linux).
Long story short, for the time being I can't do any i386 and x86_64 work, but I may be able to look around at ARM and AARCH64 stuff. I prefer the 32-bit ARM for the moment because the 64-bit beta OS doesn't have hardware acceleration on things like Internet browsing, causing significant slowdown.
Gareth aka. Kit