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?"

Comments

The following contains sarcasm:

[RingDev]

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

Try SuSE

[Ed Avis]

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.

Qt...

[ninevoltz]

Use Qt4 and forget about MONO and .NET. You won't regret it.

Re:Don't.

[Ed Avis]

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.