Successfull Linux port with Lazarus

[Felipe]

Hello,

I am a developer from a open source project called the Virtual
Magnifying Glass (http://magnifier.sourceforge.net/). It is a free,
open source, screen magnification tool. About 3 months ago we faced the
same challenge you face now. Our project was quite popular (more then
155.000 downloads and 3500 daily visits to our webpage), but it was
only available for Windows. I would like to present my experience here
in case it helps you guys with your port process.

Our objective was to port it to Linux with all the resources available
on the Windows version. The University of São Paulo in Brazil and
it´s acessibility department took the job and scalled a programmer to
do it (me).

The old version of the glass was a Microsoft Visual Studio .NET C
application. It containned a message loop hand created, WIN API calls
for nearly everything. To start with, due to budget restrictions, we
cannot in any way afford to buy a MS Visual Studio, so it was decided
that the port should use a open tool.

I am basically a long time Delphi programmer who got to know Linux and
decided to study how to port it´s programs, so I decided to port the
software to Lazarus. Other possibilities were considered, such as Mono
and .NET. Our software has 300kb and the .NET framework has 20MB. This
would mean that everyone downloading our software would also need the
heavy and slow framework, so we eliminated this option.

At first it was decided that there would be two versions of the
software, a multiplatform code on Lazarus primarely for Linux (since
Lazarus is so portable we also plan Mac OS X and Pocket PC versions),
and another Windows only version. The success of the linux port was so
big that the development team decided to completely abandon the .NET
version in favor of the Lazarus one.

The next version (3.2) of the magnifier, expected for the end of this
month, will substitute the Visual Studio version with a Lazarus
compiled software and feature a fully functional Linux software. We
also expect to have native packages for more then 20 linux
distributions on this version. A Linux beta preview is available on our
website.

I hope I have helped,

Felipe

[Andrew Higgs]

I would also like to say that I feel the code should be ported to
Lazarus. The db will obviously have to be changed (but that is another
discussion).

Felipe wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I am a developer from a open source project called the Virtual
> Magnifying Glass (http://magnifier.sourceforge.net/). It is a free,
> open source, screen magnification tool. About 3 months ago we faced the
> same challenge you face now. Our project was quite popular (more then
> 155.000 downloads and 3500 daily visits to our webpage), but it was
> only available for Windows. I would like to present my experience here
> in case it helps you guys with your port process.
>