“Mono, the open source development platform based on the .NET framework, allows developers to build Linux and cross-platform applications with improved developer productivity. Mono’s .NET implementation is based on the ECMA standards for C# and the Common Language Infrastructure.” – The Mono Project

I don’t know how I feel about Mono, other than uneasy. Even though the developers at Ximian are doing an amazing job, it is Microsoft that has the poor trust record and who has a cacophony of sly business tacticians. Recent events also indicate that Microsoft find Open Source a threat, so who knows what they might have up their sleeves in the future when Mono becomes popular. Seth Nickell has a post that could be considered thought provoking called Why Mono is Currently An Unacceptable Risk. The same holds true for Sun and their Java, since it is more or less the same scenario they could start using patents as weapons against Open Source if they suddenly feel threatened.

Despite my uneasiness I have decided to give Mono a look…

At the time of writing the latest stable release of Mono was 1.0.6. The project has a YUM repository specifically created for Fedora Core 3. If you don’t know what YUM is- “yum [Yellowdog Updater Modified] is an interactive, automated update program which can be used for maintaining systems using rpm” and rpm is the RedHat Package Manager used to manage software packages. These programs are supposed to be installed by default with Fedora Core 3. Type yum –help in the terminal to see if it is installed. For more help on yum check out FedoraFaq

Setting up the YUM Mono repository is as simple, or complicated depending on your point of view, as locating the yum.conf file and adding the following lines (e.g sudo nano /etc/yum.conf):
[mono]
name=Mono 1.0
baseurl=http://www.go-mono.com/archive/1.0.6/fedora-3-i386/
gpgcheck=0

{src}

Save and run yum check-update to get the latest headers. Next to install mono you can either run yum install mono-core mono-runtime OR yum install mono-complete. I did the latter.

[Note: If this is your first time using yum you might get a message stating that you don’t have public GPG public keys installed. You should be able to resolve this by running rpm –import /usr/share/doc/fedora-release-3/RPM-GPG-KEY*]
{src}

You might get the following dependency errors which will cause the install to fail:
Error: missing dep: libicuuc.so.26 for pkg mono-core
Error: missing dep: libicuil8n.so.26 for pkg mono-core
Error: missing dep: libicudata.so.26 for pkg mono-core


If you get the above errors, it means that you don’t have IBM’s ICU Unicode support library installed. If I understand this correctly this library is used by Mono for internationalization/unicode support. They are however in the process of replacing this library with their own implementation, but since it is so large that might take a while. In the mean time you can find this library here or on IBM’s website. Download and install the RPMs in the following order:
libicu26-2.6.2-1.novell.9.0.i386.rpm
libicu-devel-2.6.2-1.novell.9.0.i386.rpm
icu-2.6.2-1.novell.9.0.i386.rpm


I’m not sure if the version number is important or not. It is also possible that if you have updated your system (yum -y update) this library would have been installed. {src}

Run yum again to see if it did the trick.

Other packages you might want to install
monodevelop for Mono Development Tools like IDE’s etc (yum install monodevelop)
xsp for a Mono Lightweight ASP.NET server (yum install xsp)
mod_mono Apache module for ASP.NET [requires xsp] (yum install mod_mono)

See also:
Got Mono?
Java, Mono, or C++?
Miguel (Mono Fame) On MS and Sun Patent Issues

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 19th, 2005 at 6:48 pm and is filed under Technical. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.