Hi Costas!
A couple of days ago I took advantage of the price promotion on the Kylix Desktop Edition. I installed it on Wednesday night. By 1:30AM Thursday morning I had run and examined every demo and wrote my own little test app.

Kylix went BEYOND my expectations. It is, without a doubt, the most powerful GUI-RAD available on the Linux platform today. And, having used KDevelop, Glade, and a couple of commerical apps, it will be at least a couple of years or more before any other existing commerical or GPL GUI-RAD reaches Kylix's current level.

In examining a binary I created with my test app I noticed that it included the string: "Delphi for Linux, Version 14". :)

I encountered one glitch in an otherwise perfect install. My first binary wouldn't run! It gave an a "...can't find libqtintf.so...." error msg.
I went to the borland.kylix.install and borland.kylix.deploy newsgroups and asked. (Wow, are those folks hostile over there. They match or exceed Linux fanatics in the "RTFM" attitude of their responses to questions.) The solution for me, and many others who experienced the same problem, was to add the following line to /etc/profile.local

source /usr/local/kylix/bin/kylixpath

I run SuSE so that's why I put it in profile.local. I could have put it in ~/.bashrc, but it would have fired everytime I opened a terminal from the desktop.

What is really neat about Delphi6+ and Kylix is that if you write an app in Delphi using CLX then you can compile the exact same source code in Linux.

One thing that can be done, and I am going to look into it, is the ability to use the dbExpress widget as a template and create your own version. I think one that would connect to dbf tables would be nice and somewhat 'native'.

I posted some of my early experiences with Kylix in the Linux forum.

Kylix will certainly make VB and VFP coders more at ease in Linux.
JLK



>>I've just paid for a review of Kylix, and the Borland company. Result: I prefer VFP because the company has so much experience in it and existing proven products. But if all the promisespeak about marketing for VFP comes to nothing and Gartner et al keep trashing VFP and by implication us, Kylix/Delphi is the one. Good VFP'ers will have no trouble at all with the move.
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>Actually, Delphi does not compete with VFP. It competes with VB and C. It is much easier to program than C or C++ and much faster than VB. The execution speed is comparable to C++.
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>I use Delphi to create DLLs and othe speed sensitive apps. Now with Kylix it is even nicer cause we can program for Linux using an excellent environment
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>Costas