I though I'd take advantage of Borland's $200 offer for Kylix (down from their intial price of $1,290). My copy of Kylix arrived yesterday!

Four books and three CDs. Besides the Kylix CD there is a CD containing various addons, both free, open source, limited used and time limited demos. The 3rd CD is an ISO of SuSE 7.0.

It was designed to install on SuSE, Mandrake or RH. The first thing you should do is run the test program which checks to make sure you have all the right versions of various libraries and tools, like gcc, libjpeg.so.62.0.0, etc...

But, since SuSE had engineers working at Borland and Kylix will install on any SuSE 7.0+, the output of the test program was no suprise.

Open up a terminal from KDE or GNOME and "mount /cdrom", "CD /cdrom", and if your CDROM is exec then issue:
"./setup.sh", otherwise issue "sh ./setup.sh".

A beautiful splash screen appears followed by a dialog requesting verification of the install path or the ability to supply a different path. Also some checkboxes indicate various other options relating to KDE or GNOME menu links, etc... Click the install button and within a few minutes (mine took about two) the installation is complete. I installed in "/usr/local/kylix" to allow access from non-root users.

I installed Kylix on a 1GHz Athlon with 512MB of RAM. I clicked the KDE menu icon and 11 seconds later I was presented with the full app. If it were installed on my P166 with 64MB of RAM I .... I wouldn't even try to install it on such an under powered box.

The number of widgets (controls) is truely breathtaking! Especially the data-aware controls. And the speed! If you are familiar with Delphi 5 or 6 then you are truely at home on Kylix. I used Turbo Pascal to support myself and my family during the initial five years of my consulting business. Pascal is my favorite language. The object framework is heaven! The data-aware controls are heaven! Hey, Kylix is heaven! It comes with a dozen or so demos and, as I mentioned before, printed manuals.

If you had Pascal experience in the past then you can be up to speed in no time at all. If you lack OOP experience then it will take a few weeks. If you are a VB coder it could take 3 or 4 months to come up to speed, depending on how quickly you can grasp OOP.

More later!