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A Bare-Bones Linux+Mono+GUI Distro?

Posted by timothy on from the essentials-only dept.

nimble99 writes "I am a computer software engineer, focused mainly on the Windows platform — but most of my development time is spent in .NET. I would like to move my .NET development to Linux in the form of Mono, in an attempt at building a media-center type of device. All I require, is a base operating system with simple hardware support, Mono, and a window manager that (preferably) does nothing but act as a host for mono applications. Is this available? I dont know a lot about Linux, so I thought I would ask if there is already something like this available. Obviously a 'Mono Operating System' would be the cleanest solution, but a similar thing could be achieved with the barest minimum of Linux distros right?"

2 of 158 comments (clear)

  1. Try SuSE by Ed+Avis · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Mono is developed by Novell, so if that's your main app it would make sense to use their Linux distribution, SuSE. Either as OpenSuSE (or whatever the capitalization is these days; cf NeXTStep) or SLES. It is not minimal but it includes the latest Mono stuff and you can probably pay for support if you want. Since there is some overlap between Mono developers and GNOME developers and some GNOME applications like Banshee, F-Spot and Tomboy are written in C#, it probably makes sense to use GNOME as your desktop environment.

    That said, I'm quite happy with Fedora, Mono packages are included, and if you need something more recent than the last Fedora version you can easily compile it yourself.

    Your job is to be a software developer, not a desktop-customization weenie. So forget about spending time on making or finding a 'minimal' environment. Any modern Linux distribution won't get in your way and will let you get on with porting your apps to Mono.

    --
    -- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
  2. yeah, it's called... by nguy · · Score: 4, Insightful

    "I am a computer software engineer, focused mainly on the Windows platform -- but most of my development time is spent in .NET. I would like to move my .NET development to Linux in the form of Mono, in an attempt at building a media-center type of device. All I require, is a base operating system with simple hardware support, Mono, and a window manager that (preferably) does nothing but act as a host for mono applications. Is this available?

    Mono is not .NET. Mono is C# with a large number of bindings to FOSS, including Gtk+ and Gnome. So, that means you need a fairly complete complement of all the C libraries. If you want .NET on Linux, you need all of that, plus the .NET compatibility libraries; those are not usually installed. In addition to that, Linux needs its package management, installation, upgrade, system maintenance, indexing, and other tools. Those mean that you have to have a POSIX environment and a reasonable complement of C and C++ libraries.

    So, basically, what you want is one of the basic Gnome or XFCE distributions, with the additional .NET compatibility packages installed. Ubuntu and Xubuntu are good choices.

    Everybody occasionally dreams of getting rid of all the "old stuff" and just replacing it with something "modern" written entirely in the language-du-jour. But there are several reasons against that: (1) the old stuff works well enough, (2) it's not clear that you can do better, and (3) the old stuff has proven that it has staying power; C# may be gone in three years and you have to start from scratch.

    I would also recommend against programming in .NET on Linux; use Gtk# and C# bindings of the Linux native libraries instead. Monodevelop should make it pretty easy to get started, and Gtk# is a reasonable and easy-to-learn toolkit.