Installing Kylix Open Edition 1.0 on Debian Potato 2.2

Kylix is a great computer language, based on Delphi, which in turn is based on Turbo Pascal. If you can stand Kylix's self-promotion aspect (I have heard about the fact that all executables compiled under Open Kylix have a splash screen announcing itself to the world, which you have to click away before it allows you to go on with your life), then you have yourself a free compiler, which has certain libraries under the GPL.

Description of the problem:

  1. Kylix comes in RPMs for SuSE, RedHat, and Mandrake; and in tarballs has for the rest of us peons. Maybe they think that the rest of us are wizards and can deal with it :-) Actually, that's not altogether accurate. The real story is a bit longer. Debian uses the rpm files, but in a different way. The RPMs have what one of the Borland people called an "embedded stream", which is kind of like an embedded tarball. In Debian, the proper invocation is to have access to this embedded stream without refernce to RPM's install database. This behaviour is invoked by the flag "-m" which is passed to the setup.sh script.
  2. The default behaviour of the Kylix OE install script is to unravel the RPM files, which fails on Debian, since the "rpm" program is never used, and thus rpm will not see any dependencies.
  3. There is almost always a problem with non-upgraded packages as described in Kylix's INSTALL and PREINSTALL text files, especially for the upgrading of glibc2.

Your computer also has to fulfill system requirements in other ways. Read PREINSTALL and INSTALL for info.

The most important and potentially painful upgrade is to that of the GLIBC libraries. You need these upgrades - patches, really - in order to use Kylix, since the patches are Kylix-specific. Borland provides the upgrades, but of course they are in RPM format. So, what is a Debian user to do? Well, some fantastic person, *somewhere*, has made available .deb packages of those glibc patches. God bless his socks. You can find it here, or you can find it there. But if you want to place this in your /etc/apt/sources.list, then you can insert the following line:

deb http://kebo.vlsm.org/debian-extra stable kylix-support

and you will then have a way to do future installations.

UPGRADES:

What I did was upgrade libgtk and libjpeg. I already had a kernel > 2.2.x (version 2.4.6).

The glibc was patched from Debian binaries made for Kylix, provided by:

ftp://dig.utalca.cl/kylix-support/binary-i386

I had a fast connection, so I downloaded *all* of the files there and read Packages.gz for ideas on which files to skip. Install the main glibc patch first, or else you will have dependency problems.

INSTALLING KYLIX:

By then, all was cool, except for the fact that the Kylix distro itself was in RPM. Attempts to install that with the script caused RPM to think that I had no operating system, since it does none of the package management on my machine. So, the way around that (so I found out in the Kylix newsgroups, this is apparently called an "RPM bug"), was to tack an "-m" parameter after the "./setup.sh" command. The install was successful, and all seemed well.

There are now relatively minor problems, such as a window at the first startup saying that it is building a "font matrix". The window never went away, and the program did not seem to start (I had this window up for easily an hour with nothing appearing to happen - not even disk activity) (although once when I typed Control-C twice, the entire IDE came up, but unable to find libraries I took for granted under Delphi, such as TTabbedNotebook, and local DCU files). The IDE has since come up, complete with the Kylix splash screen, each time the command is invoked. However, these problems are insignificant, and there is probably documentation on it somewhere in one of the many PDFs I downloaded from the site.

Thanks for evereyone's help.

since Apr 1 2007