I've just installed Kylix Open Edition from the "Linux Format" magazine Cd cover disc, and the first time I tried to run it, up pops a dialog window titled "Generating Font Matrix" which is using some 95% of my system capacity according to "top." I let it run for slightly more than 6 hours overnight with no apparent end in sight, so I killed the process and uninstalled Kylix completely (I had installed as root, from the command prompt, rather than as a user under KDE).

I then opened KDE, and installed Kylix again, as a user. This time many more files were installed. However when I followed the instruction to re-start X and then run "startkylix" the same "Generating Font Matrix" popped up. As I type this, it's been running for four hours and 33 minutes, at 95% system usage.

Is this normal, and if so how much longer should I expect this matrix generation to take? I plan to give it at least 24 hours this time, but if it goes longer than that I think I'll blow the package away and forget it...

i remember doing the same thing, i just closed the box with the message in, restarted kylix and it ran.

I found it mentioned, finally, in the README for Kylix2; it's a known problem with some flavors of the 2.4 kernel. Applied the suggested workaround and it installed just fine.

Then I blew Kylix 1 away, anyway, and installed Kylix 2 instead. Had to rewrite part of the setup.sh script because a non-root user doesn't get a directory listing of /usr/lib under Mandrake 8.1 (wonder if that's why Borland explicitly points out that Mandy 8.1 is not certified for Kylix 2) but once I got that taken care of it installed with no other problems. The font matrix got built in just a couple of minutes.

I'm still finding a few glitches here and there, with some library modules not being located where Kylix expects to find them. I suspect this product is still not quite ready for prime time, but it definitely shows some promise...

I think Borland should just make Kylix Open Source before FreePascal beats them to it, and they end up on the street.