I can't help you with Linux stuff really, but I use JBuilder for Windows, so I have a few comments...
The app isn't as clear cut as I would like. It seems to be heavily tied to JBuilder for Linux. I usually like to use my own editor and the JDK from sun. I guess this will have to be a compounded learning experience.
This should still be possible, with the inclusion of a few jar files to your classpath. See below...
I couldn't find any decent JBuilder books. And the folks I work for are still looking for the books that came with JBuilder. It seems that those books will be an important step. I used JBuilder 1.0 and was not impressed. It wanted to permanently tie you to them and try to seperate you from Java. Not so anymore?
Not in my experience. I think some of what you saw in 1.0 may have been Borland's attempts to offer more options than awt - remember, this was before swing, and a lot of customers were finding awt lacking. Like you, I tried 1.0 and was similarly unimpressed. I tried to make a GUI, and the generated code was not at all pretty. I ignored JBuilder for a while, and finally came back for version 4.0 and subsequent releases, which I like quite well. Though to be fair I haven't done much GUI stuff with it. But it seems entirely possible to create GUIs in JBuilder which use only standard awt/swing components. Borland also offers a number of optional widjets of their own which you can employ. These are available in redistributable jar files naturally, and you can view the source if you like.
As far as books are concerned - I've always just gotten by with trial and error, actually. It's been fairly easy for me to find stuff. Of course, it helps if you're not dealing with several other learning curves at the same time. But I don't think there's much in the books that isn't also available from the JBuilder help menus. Browse them a while and see what you find.
So I'm looking through the machine and trying to get the lay of the land. What is "Borland Kylix"?
Apparently it's like Delphi for Linux. That is, it's an
IDE based around a sort of Object Pascal. That's about all I know.
Since I couldn't find a way to activate the application I'm working on from the command line, I hit "run" from within JBuilder. It started making a bunch of windows and when I had seen enough I couldn't get the windows to go away. One (possibly more) went to a big gray rectangle and insisted on being on top of everything else. I ended up having to shut down KDE and start over. How could I have handled this better?
The moment you hit run, a new panel (or a new tab on an existing panel) should have appeared across the bottom of your screen. This shows System.out and System.err from the program. The tab label shows the name of the main class. Just above this are two button/indicators, a square and a triangle. While the program is running, the triangle is grayed out, and the square is red - this is the stop button. Pressing this should kill the JVM that your program was running in - and, hopefully, all those nasty windows that were spawned. Once it's stopped, the red box goes gray, and the triangle turns green - another start (or restart) button. Should you wish to try again.
When you run from JBuilder, the very first line in the output window shows the exact command used to invoke java for this application. It's probably horrendously long, since it lists all the library jars in the -classpath option - but you can start here if you want to invoke from the command line instead.