This morning I downloaded and installed the Lazarus RAD IDE, Free pascal and its resources to my workshop PC Ubuntu 12.04 image. It all went very smoothly. I tried to run my project (Sudoku Solver) from a USB key, but the permissions on the FAT32 file system were not right, so just for now I have moved it to the home directory. The program almost worked first time, but I had an issue creating the drop down list box. In the windows version, I had moved the text entries to the list items using puzzlelistbox.items.strings [i], but this gave a floating point problem in Ubuntu, so I changed it to the more normal (and probably much better) puzzlelistbox.list.add(string). It now compiles clean and runs perfectly.
I also was a bit concerned at the large .exe file size on the windows side, so changed the Profile to Build in ‘Configure Build Lazarus’ option in the tools section to ‘Optimised IDE’, which rebuilt Lazarus, and the next time I created an .exe it was down to 3meg from 15meg.
So all is good, next step to create a Linux executable of the project.