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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?"

21 of 463 comments (clear)

  1. Heh. by SatanicPuppy · · Score: 4, Funny

    First time the "Kissing Disease" has ever been accessable to geeks.

    One the one hand, I'm all in favor of open source alternatives, and it adds a lot to linux to be able to run .Net apps, but I can't help but think we'd be better off with another language. .Net is so freaking encumbered.

    Still, it'd be nice to be able to host .Net apps on Linux servers...

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  2. Will all applications be rewritten? by mwvdlee · · Score: 4, Insightful

    This will mean that in future, all native Windows applications will easily run on Linux, with Mono.
    Will all major Windows applications be rewritten to .NET?
    I just can't imagine Adobe, Autodesk, Corel, etc. translating their code to .NET in the near future.

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    1. Re:Will all applications be rewritten? by anarxia · · Score: 4, Insightful
      All applications.. no chance. Some of them might.

      The problem is that MS (intentionally or not) left a lot of functionality out of the .NET standard libraries _AND_ made it almost trivial to call native code from within .NET.
      The end result is that most applications end up using Win32 DLLs directly so wine is still necessary.

  3. Easily run by DrXym · · Score: 5, Insightful
    Someone has obviously never tried running a .NET application under Mono. More often than not, it calls Win32 via PInvoke, uses an ActiveX control / COM interop, or does something else which renders it unusable on other platforms. Some apps might work, particularly command line tools, but it is by no means guaranteed or even probable.

    And this is probably what MS had in mind all along. And I don't see it changing either. Microsoft make it easy to slap together apps with their stack and tools. Mono makes it hard to do the same with theirs. That means Mono will constantly be playing catch-up with Microsoft, reaching for but never getting close to 100% compatibility.

    1. Re:Easily run by adolfojp · · Score: 4, Informative

      There is a WinForms compatibility layer in the making. Its first release will handle the WinForms of the 1.1 .net specification. Mono will be forced to play catching up with this GUI framework and it uses the compatibility stack instead of the ECMA compliant one.

      If you want to make Linux applications using Mono I strongly recommend using GTK#. Beagle and F-Spot use GTK#.

      Cheers,
      Adolfo

  4. talking about exaggeration by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    This will mean that in future, all native Windows applications will easily run on Linux, with Mono.

    How about

    This may mean that in the future, some native Windows applications will run on Linux, with Mono.

  5. Will Mono achieve what WINE could not? by overshoot · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

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    1. Re:Will Mono achieve what WINE could not? by MobyDisk · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Actually it is quite easy because of one crucial difference. It's not the implementation that matters, it is the interface. And .NET provides a good interface.

      Even if Microsoft implemented the .NET APIs as wrappers around Windows APIs, the fact is that the APIs are clean and they are well documented. They follow the rules of encapsulation well. That makes it possible to re-implement them in a straightforward fashion. The problem with WINE is that the Windows API does not follow good design and rules of encapsulation, so the implementation is often exposed. WINE is not an implementation of an API as much as it is a reverse-engineering of one. But that problem goes away with .NET.

      Mono today works stunningly well today. The only issue is Windows Forms, because it isn't as well encapsulated as the rest of the API.

  6. Re:Summary by timeOday · · Score: 5, Insightful
    Yes, off topic, but it's nice to see a well written and concise topic summary around here once in a while.
    But how accurate is it?
    This will mean that in future, all native Windows applications will easily run on Linux, with Mono.
    I think that's far premature. Without even knowing yet what the catch is, I know there will be some. I just don't think Microsoft will let Windows apps seamlessly run under Linux, one way or another.
  7. Some interesting stuff coming in .NET by Sanity · · Score: 5, Interesting
    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?

  8. Re:From the article you linked to: by H4x0r+Jim+Duggan · · Score: 4, Insightful

    "The problematic parts are not the core technologies submitted to the ECMA or the Unix/Gnome-specific parts."

    The problem (software patents) can affect any part. If MS have claimed they don't have patents on "core parts", you cannot trust them. If the Mono devs have claimed that MS don't have patents on "core parts", they are saying something they can't possibly know.

    As well as including "according to the public statements of MS and the Mono devs", you should also read that sentence with the qualification: "for now anyway".

    if you say something is not well thought out, also saying why

    The reasons why their plan is not well though out are given in that article, in the last paragraph of that section, just after the list of the 3 strategies.

  9. Vista will muddle the developer landscape by boxlight · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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

  10. What I want to know is ..... by ajs318 · · Score: 5, Funny

    ..... why wasn't the Open Source clone of the "C#" programming language called "Db" ?

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  11. Re:Unless you use python by gowen · · Score: 4, Insightful
    Instead the portage system pulls in Python for no particular reason.
    Portage is a complicated set of programs. Complicated programs are easier to write in python, because of the languages features, and complicated secure programs even more so. They're written in python because the developers consider it (one of) the best solutions to the problem.

    If you know better, and think it should have been written in C, I', sure the present developers would be very interested in seeing your port.
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  12. Misleading by JanneM · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The whole "run Win-apps under Linux" really is a little misleading. That's not really the point of Mono for most users.

    The point, rather, is that it is a very, very nice development environment and a very pleasant language, well-suited for application development, as f-spot and others are a testament to. As a bonus, the apps written under mono will be easy to deploy under Windows as well, should it be needed.

    And when you use Mono to write desktop apps under Linux you aren't using anything Windows-related that isn't covered by the ECMA standard. You have no larger exposure to patent issues than you have under any other environment (possibly barring plain C and POSIX libs. Possibly).

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  13. Re:Mono and python by m50d · · Score: 5, Insightful

    How is it a boil? It's a great language, very useful, makes the base system smaller overall (because so many things can be made much smaller in python) and is nice to be able to depend on it being available. Slating distributions for depending on python is like criticising them for depending on libc.

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  14. Re:Why .MONO by Christopher+B.+Brown · · Score: 4, Interesting
    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."

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  15. Re:Simple question -- simple answer. by Eivind · · Score: 4, Interesting
    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.

  16. Re:Summary by Jugalator · · Score: 5, Interesting
    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.
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  17. Re:The patent problems have not been addressed by afabbro · · Score: 4, Insightful
    What is this .Net related lock-in that you are speaking of?

    Hey, I'd like to develop a .Net program and run it on Solaris/AIX/Linux/etc. Oh, I can't? Gee, seems like I'm locked in to the Windows platform with .Net.

    Compare and contrast with Java. Or open source code. Or a lot of closed-source code, for that matter. Just like Visual Basic, if you write in .Net, you're only writing for Windows.

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  18. Completely missing the point by GauteL · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The inclusion of Mono in Fedora is the first step towards healing a rather serious potential rift in the GNOME world. Up until now, you could not develop a Mono-app with GTK# and expect it to work on all major updated distributions without added software.

    Don't worry about Windows compatibility, Mono is cool enough on it's own, especially because Novell/Ximian has done such a good job with the Mono-wrappers for GNOME-technologies. Hopefully this will see more GNOME-development.