Ultibo has always included customized builds of the FreePascal compiler and Lazarus IDE, unfortunately at the time we started both of these projects were using subversion (SVN) to manage their version control and the process of creating a fork required jumping through a lot of hoops.

We’ve been keen to upgrade to a more recent version of both FreePascal and Lazarus for a while and last year we heard the news that they were moving both projects to GitLab which would finally allow us to create a proper fork and use the power and flexibility of Git to maintain it.

It took a while for the changeover to happen and it’s also taken quite a bit of work to get everything setup and reapply all of our customizations but we think we’ve got it sorted now so we’ve just released a beta of both the Windows installer and the Linux install script that allows you to install and use the current versions of FreePascal and Lazarus for your Ultibo development.

The beta will last a few weeks and is your chance to provide feedback on anything that doesn’t seem quite right or isn’t working the way you’d expect, download the beta installer for Windows or the install script for Linux to get started trying it out. There’s some more detail provided in our Announcement on the Ultibo forum and if you have questions or run into any issues please post there as well so we can get it resolved.

While it took some work to get here now we finally will be keeping up with the Lazaruses. Of course that’s a word, isn’t it?

Update April 16, 2022

The beta process is now complete and the new version of Ultibo 2.5.001 has been released. We’ve updated the links above to reflect the official versions instead.

Thanks for testing.