I'm exploring alternatives to Debian on SPARC. One of the obvious ones is BSD which (I presume) will need some cross-builds to get FPC going.

Can anybody comment on /which/ BSD variant is likely to add fewest problems to my heap?

In FreeBSD 10 64-bit, Lazarus was updated to the latest stable 1.2. I tested Lazarus with the application I need (Database) and it works fine.

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Mark Morgan Lloyd wrote

I'm exploring alternatives to Debian on SPARC. One of the obvious ones is BSD which (I presume) will need some cross-builds to get FPC going.

No, you will need to port FPC to those targets. The BSD rtls are afaik not Sparc ready. (though there is not that much architecture dependent, and much can be copied from Linux I guess).

Can anybody comment on /which/ BSD variant is likely to add fewest problems to my heap?

FreeBSD is generally more advanced, but Netbsd and openbsd are usually more non x86 friendly. However that is old sentiment, I don't know the current situation.

Thanks, I'm not sure which direction I'm heading since Debian "Wheezy" on SPARC is badly broken (e.g. FireFox/IceWeasel won't run). I'll be trying "Sid" next to see if there's any hope at all, after that possibly revisiting Solaris followed by Gentoo and possibly xBSD.

I'm using FPC & Lazarus on FreeBSD, too. It's nice to have a precompiled binary for FPC and Laz at hand if something won't work. I can't speak for SPARC though, but you can look there:

http://www.freebsd.org/platforms/sparc.html

Maybe other BSDs have better support (Tier 1 in FreeBSD terms).

Lastly you need to get the compiler working on your OS/CPU-combination, as Marco mentioned ...

Thanks for that Marc, I'm not sure I'll get there yet since the pressing problem is to have browsers etc. working on a comparatively familiar platform, so /if/ the latest Debian looks OK I might stick there for a while.

For Solaris users, I notice that sunfreeware.com now requires a subscription for the vast majority of downloads. Obviously there's mirrors for older files.

Marco van de Voort wrote

However that is old sentiment, I don't know the current situation.

That is correct. The latest FreeBSD supports quite a few targets (even ARM7) - unlike years back.

Regards,
- Graeme -

That's indeed the only arch added since I last looked. Most of the other pages aren't even updated.