Fedora Core 5 includes Mono

cyberjessy writes "Surprise! The Fedora Core 5 Release will include Mono in the distribution, in spite of Red Hat's opposition. In addition to the Mono runtime, it will also include Mono applications like Beagle and F-Spot. Is the Linux community finally ready to accept Mono? Mono is becoming increasing important due to Windows Vista, which has WinFX (the next .Net Framework) as its core API. This will mean that in future, all native Windows applications will easily run on Linux, with Mono. Will Mono achieve what WINE could not?"

Comments

Will Mono achieve what WINE could not?

[overshoot]

Not a chance. All of the MS application base (including the new ".NET" stuff) still depends on the underlying Win32 system functions, DLLs, etc. The newer interpreted APIs are just wrappers around the older stuff.

Some interesting stuff coming in .NET

[Sanity]

Microsoft has some interesting technologies in the pipeline for .NET 3.0. One of the most exciting is LINQ which will change the way we interact with SQL databases, and data in general from within our code. Other language enhancements will mean that Java has a lot of catching up to do (and no, I'm not a M$ fanboy, Java is my tool of choice and I use a Mac).

The question is: Will Mono support these new features, and if so, when?

Vista will muddle the developer landscape

[boxlight]

Mono is becoming increasing important due to Windows Vista

As a developer, I have great concern over how Vista will muddle the Windows landscape. Microsoft is creating a situation where developers have to build and test for way too many Windows platforms.

That is, many developers and network administrators use Windows 2000 exclusively and most other pros and home users use XP -- and my father in law still uses Windows 98. NONE of these people have any intention of upgrading to Vista. So Vista will likely only be installed on new PCs

It's getting to the point where there's just too many versions of Windows out there to support:

Win 98 SE
Win 2k Workstation and Server(s)
Win XP Home and Pro
Win Vista??

And the pointy-haired-bosses will continue to shout that *all* versions of Windows must be supported. That means more development, more testing, more installers, more deep sighs.

The "write once run anywhere" of Java is becoming more attractive all the time.

boxlight

Re:Why .MONO

[Christopher B. Brown]

There is a merit of MONO over Java, for free-ish software, namely that it is likely to be a more uniform platform than Java.

The trouble with Java, at present, is that full implementations (complete with all the latest J2EE, Java 1.whatever-is-latest) are proprietary to Sun and other commercial vendors. You can't include a full-scale Java with a Linux distribution; the licenses won't permit it, as the implementations aren't "free" the way Linux and attendant software in a Linux distribution need to be.

The lowest common denominator takes you back to partial implementations of Java 1.2 or the like; Kaffe, Classpath, and the like, with no Swing GUI and I'm not sure if Eclipse will run well with these "partial" Java environments.

MONO avoids all that; the free implementation is reasonably full featured, seemingly moreso than the "libre software" implementations of parts of Java.

I doubt it'll actually provide all that much interoperability with Windows. But the point of it was that the Ximian folk were getting tired of fighting with writing C memory management code for dynamic applications like Evolution. If they can write "Evolution Next Generation" using MONO, and have it be smaller, more componentized, more powerful, and more robust than struggling with the C version, that could be the "killer app" that makes MONO worthwhile in its own right, ignoring Microsoft's software.

It seems to me that Beagle is one of the relevant components for MONO-based "killer apps."

Re:Simple question -- simple answer.

[Eivind]

Yeah, sure, it's something completely different from Wine. But my "no" was sorta based on something different, namely the idea that, as stated in the blurb:

This will mean that in future, all native Windows applications will easily run on Linux, with Mono. Will Mono achieve what WINE could not?"

Mono will certainly not ever come anywhere *close* to being able to run "all native Windows applications", there's like half a dozen independent reasons for that, ranging from your "it'd require a recompile in any case" trough unpleasant little facts like the fact that Mono is trying to chase a moving target that is willing to spend a lot of money and man-hours precicely to *avoid* that too much works with Mono.

In sum, they'll have all the problems of Wine, and then some. (the need for sourcecode f.ex)

Worse yet: the mono-developers are suggesting one migth want to develop OSS applications with a primary target being Free OSes under Mono. Doing so would be double hurtful: It'd ensure that any such application developed for Linux works perfectly under Windows (because mono is a *subset* of the MS-environment, AND because all OSS-applications come with source), but *not* the oposite.

It's a braindead waste of time. I don't see how I can put it more politely. It actively hurts the Free Software ecosystem.

Re:Summary

[Jugalator]

Yes, as far as I know, there are no plans to clone "WinFX" at this point for Vista compatibility.

WinFX is far from required for "Vista compatibility". Basically no applications will use WinFX when Vista is released, and I have to wonder how many Windows developers are actually ready to jump ship from unmanaged C++ to .NET and WinFX. The new WinFX development models with e.g. Windows Presentation Foundation and XAML for UI development, etc. are totally incompatible with current C++ applications. It feels like several years ahead at the very least.

As for the Windows.Forms namespace, it's well underway actually. In the November 2005 status report, word is:

Windows.Forms is the only piece that is holding us from officially renaming Mono to Mono 1.2, it is still missing a few features. Our plan is to complete the missing features by the end of this month and then move to bug fixing and testing open source our publicly accessible Windows.Forms applications. We are planning on spending three months on bug fixing at this point.

This hardly sounds too unattainable to me.

And before anyone asks, no, Windows Forms 2.0 support isn't required for "Vista compatibility" either.