This Old Blog

Well, I gave it the old college try and tried to create an up-to-date Mono development environment on top of my aging Fedora 14 installation. I should have know better , considering how many times in the past I've beaten myself bloody with some specific feature of Linux. It all started innocently enough. I cloned a copy of Mono from their git repository and built it without any issues. I wrote a number of increasingly complex C# applications to test the compiler and runtime. No problems were encountered. But I noticed I couldn't compile or run any GUI applications. Complimenting that was a lack of MonoDevelop 3 , the Mono/C# development IDE. When I started to dig into how to build and run that particular tool, I ran into problems. Fedora 14, released November 2010, is running Gnome 2.32. Fedora 14 is the last Fedora release to run Gnome 2. Fedora moved to Gnome 3 starting with version 15, and that's one important reason why I stayed with Fedora 14 and continue to stay ...

It's been a while since I touched my personal Android 4 repository hosted on my aging Latitude D630 and its Fedora 14 installation. I started hosting (and building) Android 4 just to get the experience in handling that particular project, as well as creating my own version of ICL to run on my Nook Color (Encore). The directions were initially written for CyanogenMod 7.x (Gingerbread) but are still pretty accurate (for the most part) for CyanogenMod 9.x (Ice Cream Sandwich). The only problem being the following: After performing repo sync (which is what I started with this time), during the build process, I ran into a build-halting error where libjackpal-androidterm4.so could not be found. Sure enough I didn't have that, just the earlier libjackpal-androidterm3.so. Looking around a bit on the internets I found the solution: right before build cd into cm/vendor and execute get-prebuilts . This will unpack term.apk and give you the correct library to build against. DO NOT d...

In my first taste of Mono on openSUSE 11.1 I was left with a flat taste in my mouth (so to speak). So I blogged about those experiences, and then I got this response from Micheal Hutchinson: I'm sorry your MonoDevelop experience hasn't been great so far. I'm not aware of any reported crashers on 11.1, but if you get stack traces, could you please file bugs so that we can fix them? It's been a long time since MD 1.0 was released and in many ways the 2.0 alphas are more stable. I'm building MD trunk builds on the openSUSE Build Sevice, which should be relatively stable until 2.0 is formally released. There's even a 1-click install. You maybe also find that some problems are fixed by upgrading GTK# to 2.12.6 from the Mono repository. FWIW, the particular errors you've pasted in your post can safely be ignored. Various Mono debug files (.mdb) seem to be missing, but they aren't strictly needed for MD. Maybe the stock oS 11.1 has these in separate packages. ...

Verdict: not so tasty I grabbed all the Mono packages via YaST and installed them without problems. I then fired up monodevelop in a terminal so I could watch for warnings and errors. I'm glad I did. I won't bore you with screen shots of creating a simple 'Hello world' application. I will say that monodevelop is crashy. For example, without having created anything, I attempted to see what the Classes tab on the left side of the IDE would produce if opened. Normally it should be blank; that's what every other IDE in the known universe shows. Instead MonoDevelop crashed and exited. Hmmm... After the second startup I created the simple 'Hello World' project as a console program with Gtk# extensions. I didn't add any other code. I then had the project build and run within the IDE. During that entire time I got a stream of error messages, such as the following sample: ERROR [2008-12-22 10:49:57Z]: Mono.CompilerServices.SymbolWriter.MonoSymbolFileException: Ca...

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...