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Tuesday, November 18, 2008

Super Crazy Linux Week

Well, not Super Crazy... but fun just the same.  Just this last week, I dug out my old laptop, and installed Linux on it.  Fedora Core 9 actually.  It's been fun...

Why would I do such a thing?  Well it started off as boredom,  I just wanted to.  Besides, the laptop wasn't being used for anything.

Once I got it set up, I started playing with mono.  For those of you who are still actually unaware of what mono is, it's an open source Microsoft .NET compliant framework.  Although my super technical definition may not be 100% accurate, you might want to look it up on wikipedia, or on the mono project homepage.

The last time I had played with mono was about 2 years ago.  And I have to tell you, I am very impressed with what I have seen this week.  I was able to compile a relatively complicated project built to run in Visual Studio 2008, for .NET 2.0.  While it did not execute exactly as expected, the areas it lacked were really not a big deal, and I was able to find ways around each and every issue I have faced so far.

My biggest complaint with Fedora Core, was the fact that the package manager did not have access to the most recent versions of the mono tools, and I had a great deal of difficulty compiling the latest to make it run on Fedora Core 9.  So my task now is to find the most perfect "out of the box" distribution for mono.

I installed Ubuntu to start my search.  The results weren't bad, but I totally missed the obvious.  I'm probably looking for OpenSUSE or SLES, since Novell is sponsoring the development of mono.  I'm burning OpenSUSE to DVD right now...

Anyways, out of the box, Ubuntu was a lot lighter weight, and more graphically appealing.  But how would it fare with immediate mono support.  Not bad actually.  I did have to add the 'universe' repository to the package manager, but I was able to get the most recent version of mono develop and a somewhat recent version of the framework up and running, and with just a few clicks of the mouse.

My beef with Ubuntu, is that the ASP.NET functionality did not work out of the box when I set it up in this way.  The updates also took significantly longer to apply with Ubuntu.

So tonight, I am going to try out OpenSUSE, and I'll post my results here.  If anyone has any opinion on the matter, or any good/bad experiences working with mono, I'd love to hear about it.

8 comments:

  1. Interesting.

    I have two comments:

    1. Your beef with Ubuntu should be redirected to Microsoft for being so close-minded/attempting to lock you into one environment, and

    2. Have you heard of Java? ;)

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  2. Yeah, yeah, you and everyone else, that's all I hear about.. is this Java. =)

    My beef with Ubuntu is not deep routed. In Fedora Core, ASP.NET worked great, in Ubuntu I was not able to set it up in an obvious way. So that was just a comparison. (though I think we all wonder exactly where on the fence our friendly neighborhood Microsoft sits)

    The sense that I'm getting from you and at least a few others is "why would I bother?"

    First, where is your guys' sense of adventure? Java had it's beginnings as well, and I think we should give mono a chance here. The functionality is quite impressive, such to the point where we can compile and run commercial applications with little to no code changes, and they are behaving almost as exactly expected. The amount of business value to the ability to re-use that code is outstanding.
    The curiosity factor may be even greater. We have to remember that these applications were never designed to run on anything except Microsoft .NET framework.

    I really like where this discussion is going, I think I'll post some examples, to show some of the unexpected power, and unprecedented levels of compatibility.

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  3. Yeah, I'm not a big M$ fan, as you may have guessed. But I can appreciate what you're doing here. It is interesting, and I think it does have value.

    Let us know how it works out.

    ReplyDelete
  4. But really... there's a little love for MS in all of us right?.. right?

    Yeah, I'll keep you posted. I did get OpenSUSE set up, and I am very much liking the results so far. I'll likely get into posting actual comparisons and more findings. Feel free to point out where Java differs as well. I may not be a Java guy, but I am interested.

    ReplyDelete
  5. I'm not quite sure what you mean "where Java differs". You mean with platform independence? There's no comparison. That was THE MAIN driving force for the creation of Java. Write and compile once and distribute it to ANY platform/environment/architecture without modification.

    And now Java and most of the tools that go with it, including top-notch IDE's, are open source so there's no licensing crap and red tape to get caught up in.

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  6. Well I meant more on a per incident scenario. ie, when I start talking about differences in behavior when building singleton or percall web services, or forms applications etc.

    .NET is also Platform independent from the ground up, it just so happens frameworks or virtual machines aren't available for many platforms. Anything host specific would have to be marshaled.

    now, as I understand it, .NET does have licensing crap, especially 2.0 and above. But mono would not.

    There are a few IDEs for .NET that are pretty good too. In windows, SharpDevelop is an honorable mention, it's not as mature as say... eclipse, but it's come along way.

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  7. YENDOR!.. have you seen this?

    http://www.adtools.com/products/windows/netcobol.html

    ReplyDelete
  8. Oh no! I'm in another world! Sorry Mike I have zero IQ for these things. Hehehehehe! Passing by to check out your blog.

    ReplyDelete

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