Your Kylix Study Guide

By John Kaster, Borland Developer Relations

The Kylix Project

Kylix is the project code name for Delphi and C++ Builder on Linux. You can read more about the Kylix project in the original Kylix Press Release. For additional information on Kylix, you can go to the Borland Linux products web site, or to the Linux community. To see all the community articles that mention Kylix, you can also search for "Kylix".

The Kylix Kickstart for TCBs

Borland is hosting a Kylix Kickstart meeting all day Monday, March 20th, 2000. We have sent out invitations to all our registered Tools and Component Builder (TCB) partners, so we can put them on the bleeding edge of support for Kylix. The TCBs need extra time for their products ready to ship around the time Kylix does, and they're willing to take the risk of that information changing before the product actually ships. (This is part of the "fun" of being a TCB.)

When I was talking with the R&D team, it was clear that there is simply too much information to cover in one day for all the technical aspects of Kylix. While specific implementation details on Kylix may not be released to the public yet, the background information on Linux and what our development team used for research may help you understand the general issues involved in developing Delphi for Linux.

The Public Study Guide

Here's the start of a study guide for the kickstart meeting. All of the links in this guide are public links. I thought the rest of you who are not invited to the Kylix kickstart meeting because you're not a TCB might still be interested in seeing the Linux references our development team is using while they work on Kylix.

Because Linux is so distributed, one source like an MSDN for Linux development does not exist. Finding out various implementation details we will face with Kylix is very time-consuming, and is a costly part of "research" done with R&D. I hope the links our R&D team has discovered will help save you some time. If you have other links to suggest, by all means please let me know by adding a comment to this article, and I will add them.

General Linux Sites

Linux Programming

The following links are on programming for Linux, including GUI environments, printing systems, localization, tools, and so on.

Apache Web Server Information

General Internet Programming

Installation and Deployment Links

Linux doesn't have a system registry like Windows does. It doesn't have a standard install mechanism like Windows 2000 does with MSI. It doesn't have resource files. It doesn't even have a specification for where application-specific information should be placed. Different Linux distributions even support different (and incompatible) packaging technologies. All this creates some difficult installation and integration issues for deploying applications (even development tools) on the Linux platform.

What Linux does have is a variety of solutions for installing software, including:

Linux News

Some of the popular web sites that host Linux discussions or news announcements

Glossary of Linux Terms

There's a lot more to Linux lingo than this, but it's a start. You should also note that Linux is case-sensitive everywhere, so the only terms that are uppercased in this list are the acronyms. You can also look at this large jargon site for additional terms.