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A Bare-Bones Linux+Mono+GUI Distro?
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?"
You could build a Gentoo install to satisfy this. With Gentoo you build the system to fit what you want out of it.
I'm starting to think GNU is the problem with "GNU/Linux" these days.
Monoppix perhaps?
I haven't tried it yet but the description sounds about right.
1 (short ton / firkin) = 89.1432354 slugs / keg
Did he ask you your opinion on the .net Framework/Stack? I am pretty much against Microsoft as much as anyone, but given the fact that their .net is pretty-much-fkinly-successful, maybe Mono can get some .net programmers to cross the bridge.
.net. Therefore, it is NOT a microsoft product. It's more akin to Wine than Windows.
Also, Mono TECHNICALLY isn't a Windows infrastructure. It's heavily based on a Microsoft-created execution and "vm" stack (vm not so much, but i disgress), but it's a reimplementation of
This is my opinion. Everyone has a right to my opinion.
Thank you for answering the question. A truly informative, well thought out, and highly insightful post. I'm sure with your great advice the asker will make great strides in his project. And following along your high standards more technical solutions and products will be introduced to the market.
Thank you,
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
Ubuntu Server edition installs as just a command line without all the fluff. From there you could add Mono and any GUI of your choice.
Bearded Dragon
Just install a basic net installation of Debian. You'll get nothing but a console. Apt-get the GUI of your choice. Apt-get Mono. You're done.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
If you are on windows and have decent ram you can try the mono vmware image. It boots opensuse desktop and has mono and monodevelop ready to go. go here: http://www.go-mono.com/mono-downloads/download.html Click on the vmware image.
I'm a Windows developer who uses Linux at home.
.NET model and the C# language (Anders Hejlsberg has been my hero ever since he developed Delphi during his Borland years) that I cannot help but prefer its usage, even in a Linux environment.
As a user, I am philosophically opposed to Mono as an unwanted Windows fingerprint on my completely FOSS system (except for my nVidia drivers; alas, I am not perfect).
As a developer, I am so completely convinced of the superiority of the
I'm thinking about developing a split personality to deal with this paradox.
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
Use Qt4 and forget about MONO and .NET. You won't regret it.
Death is life's great reward. R. Hoek
Bah. The yardstick is not 'has nothing to do with Microsoft Windows' but rather 'gives you and others freedom to use, share and change the software'. If you just wanted to eliminate Microsoft you could buy a Mac and not buy Office for it. Mono is completely free and open source software. Yes, it is a clone of a proprietary system, just as GNU started out as a clone of proprietary Unix.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
I've been playing around with Debian Live recently and the level of control you have over package selection and customization is impressive. It takes a little work to get used to the build system and how to customize your final image, but after you get through it once it is very simple.
You also have the ability to build images for CD-Rom's, usb sticks, netboot or hard drive images.
If you are not familiar with Linux, this route may be like jumping into the deep end. As others have mentioned, you may be better off using a canned distro like Monoppix while you do your development so you know exactly what you need in the end. Once you are comfortable and ready to move toward your final product, look towards Debian live.
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I dont know a lot about Linux, so I thought I would ask if there is already something like this available.
Anyway, here is my suggestion, but, as another poster has already pointed out, any Linux/GUI permutation would probably work just as well:
Some people would argue that using Slackware for this is crazy, but (a) Slackware is a lean and mean developement platform, and a very lean Linux distribution and (b) it will teach you a lot of things about Linux, and UNIX in general.
I hope this helps!
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
Is that exact arrangement pre-made? Probably not. Why don't you let us know what you're trying to accomplish so that we can steer you in the right direction?
I'm a KDE guy, but my first suggestion would be to install Ubuntu with the stock Gnome desktop. Just because you can run other applications doesn't mean that you have to.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
"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?
.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.
.NET compatibility packages installed. Ubuntu and Xubuntu are good choices.
.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.
Mono is not
So, basically, what you want is one of the basic Gnome or XFCE distributions, with the additional
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
DSL is also a good choice for a set-top box - only 50MB of disk space required, and it is based on Debian so pretty much any application you want/need is already packaged and available in the repository.
That said, if you are going to be doing Mono development you will want a full desktop environment - for that any distro will work fine. I'd go with a full Debian install on your development machine so you have the same library versions/builds on both systems.
For the final media center PC, you don't actually need a window manager - you can run X11 applications without a WM, and if all you are doing is running a single fullscreen app that is often preferable. I used to do that when running quake on memory starved systems. Do a search for the xinitrc file to learn how to set that up.
.NET is nice. But it doesn't seem such a massive improvement as some people make it seem. I use .NET a lot, and I have touched Java and I am familiar with C++. I don't see much that .NET exclusively offers. My favourite language is still Python however. And I may be letting my perception of Microsoft and the destruction of Delphi cloud my judgment. .NET is nice on Windows, definitely. But on Linux, there are so many more alternatives.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
Check out Vala: C# like syntax, no runtime, FOSS.
tomorrow who's gonna fuss
After reading the interviews on artima.com with Anders it's pretty clear that he's mostly a blowhard -- like Beck, all style and no substance. Take this for example:
Bill Venners:
Anders Hejlsberg: They can never inline a virtual method invocation.
Bill Venners: My understanding is that these JVM's first check if the type of the object on which a virtual method call is about to be made is the same as the one or two they expect, and if so, they can just plow on ahead through the inlined code.
Anders Hejlsberg: Oh, yes. You can optimize for the case you saw last time and check whether it is the same as the last one, and then you just jump straight there.
Not only is Anders being handed his hat by the interviewer, but he doesn't even realize that for almost ten years all Java methods have been effectively final until overridden, doing exactly that which he says is impossible. There is no 'same as last time' check since it is compiled as if there was one function. There is no 'jump straight there' when the method is inlined, and no performance lost from virtual methods that are not overridden. In contrast,
None these guys on the core C# team were anywhere close to the same level as say Joy or Bracha, and it shows. Yeah, if you're coming from Win32 and MFC then C#/.net seems pretty awesome, but it's not. They made a lot of really bad design decisions that make it really suck compared to what it could be and what they ripped it off from. So it kind of depresses me a little bit when people gush quixotic about how great
It's not for the feint of heart, but you might look at using LFS to build such a minimal system. I don't really see the harm in using a "full" Linux machine for the development environment, and then using LFS to build the embedded image that you deploy to "real" devices. We do this where I work.
http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/
It'll get the job done. If your totally new to Linux, it might be a bit much, but the folks on the lists are quite helpful.
Kirby
Wow, you took a miscommunication about a very complex technical feature and turned it into "getting his hat handed to him"?
Furthermore, Anders is actually correcting the interviewer because the JVM isn't "inlining virtual method invocations", it's optimizing them.
And I'd bet money that I'm far from alone in thinking this.
"16MB (fuck off, MiB fascists)" - The Mighty Buzzard
For inlining a function to mean anything, it cannot be virtual. An inlined function is in essence a macro.
And Anders is more accurate than Bill. What Bill says translates to: you can turn a virtual function into an inline function with a if ( this_class__is_not_X_or_Y ) jump_to_virtual_function_table type structure. What Andres says translates to: Sure, in that case. But it's an optimization.
I see that you get the best of both worlds in that situation, but Andres is right in his unequivical "You cannot inline a virtual function." Because you cannot. You can inline exactly one version of a virtual function with an if at the top, or more if you use a bunch of ifs/a switch. But the latter removes the benefits of inlining. So, a clever compiler can have a sometimes inlined response.
And the begining of your critique is just as poor. He said that it was impossible to inline a virtual function. Stating that most functions are not virtual attacks the fact, not the logic. He said "this [disproved emperical condition] results in poor performance because of [insert logical rule] makes it impossible." Disproving the emperical condition does not disprove the logical rule.
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But more to the point, inlining a function is more than just about changing a jump into a compare. It is also about the code matching up with the caller so that registers are not shuffled around and whatnot. It's about determining that the object allocated by the caller and then passed down three levels of function calls never has a reference taken so it can be allocated on the stack.
If you think inlining means 'just avoiding a jump' then you couldn't be more wrong. But what Anders said does accurately describe CLR... it will never be able to inline effectively due to its type system ('real' generics) and bytecode (have to track types, no interpreting) and other defects conspiring to make deep inlining mostly impossible. CLR is always going to be slow at running 'safe' code because it was designed on false assumptions like 'no final == slow'. [anders:] You can optimize for the case you saw last time and check whether it is the same as the last one, and then you just jump straight there Which is not the same thing as inlining, it's memoizing. So not only was Anders wrong initially, wrong to say inlining 'can never' be done, but he did not understand what the JVM does even after the interviewer explained it to him. This is your design hero?
Banshee, one of the really popular audio players, is based on Mono. When Banshee-1 comes out, a lot of people will be using it. Trust me.
... ahem ... Ubuntu 8.04 is a Mono app.
F-Spot, the default photo app for
Beagle is Mono.
Tomboy Notes is Mono.
The way I see it, most of the brand new, quickly developing application software is based on Mono.quickly
Put identity in the browser.
I develop in Mono. I have chosen OpenSUSE over other distibutions because it's Novell behind and I thought that Novell would be the best company to packaged correctly MonoDevelop, Mono and everything else.
The OpenSUSE installation lets you remove unwanted apps. But well I have never removed anything...Quite the contrary, You always needs specific tools.
Oh...And well you are going to develop pro applications right? So I wouldn't advice to take the last little distribution...Somes are maintained by one person mostly...If this person gets sick or is fed up by the maintenance...You are in trouble. For pro the best thing is to wait until the distribution becomes mainstream (Ubuntu, Gentoo, etc.)