This Old Blog

Booting Knoppix allowed me to play with a number of applications bundled with the distribution. One of them was MonoDevelop, the Mono C# IDE. I was intrigued with the prospect of being able to create cross-platform applications in C# that could be developed equally on Linux using MonoDevelop as well as on Windows using Visual Studio 2005. What I discovered is that MonoDevelop is a simplistic development IDE at best. If you want a powerful IDE under C#, then it's best to stick with Visual Studio under Windows. For other languages, such as Java, there are alternatives to powerful and complete cross-platform editing. I started this simple experiment under Windows XP on my notebook with VS2005. I wanted to create a complete project with solution file that I could then attempt to open under MonoDevelop running on Linux. I followed a Microsoft walk-through (similar to a Java trail) that allowed me to create a very simple C# application with a single window and some controls. You see it ...

It's impossible to write a decent review of any complex distribution, let alone Knoppix. These few posts are a quick pass at features that caught my eye while I had Knoppix up and running. This time I'm going to look at two IDEs, Eclipse and MonoDevelop . Everybody should know what Eclipse is by now. Along with Sun's NetBeans , it's one of two of the best open and free IDEs on the market. Eclipse, written in Java, started life as a Java IDE. Over time it has grown into a development platform for C and C++, SQL (and database management in general), various dynamic languages such as Perl, Python, Php, and Ruby, as well as software engineering in general. NetBeans is following a similar path. As significant as it is to find Eclipse, it's also notable that NetBeans is not a part of Knoppix. Let me also note that Java 5 is bundled with Knoppix, but not Java 6, which was released in November 2006. The version of Eclipse bundled with Knoppix 5.1 is the latest release, 3...

It's been my dark secret for years that I used Windows 9x, then Windows 2000, then XP, to 'bootstrap' Linux. I'd download an ISO for a given distribution, then use Windows (first Roxio, then Nero) to burn the CD. Then I'd boot into the distro and give Linux a whirl. Up until Suse 10 I never seemed to have the same level of success buring CDs with Linux that I had with Windows. But all that's changed now. Suse is the workhorse that does everything for me now. Using KDE apps found within Suse 10.2 (and found on other distributions with current KDE tools), I downloaded and burned the Knoppix 5.1.1 DVD ISO and gave Knoppix a whirl. The apps I used were KTorrent to grab the ISO and K3b to burn it. I find the latest KTorrent to be every bit as good as Azureus , and K3b is absolutely great for burning any type of CDROM or DVD. Why go to the trouble to download and boot the various distributions? Because you learn something new every time, and you get an opportunity t...