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Banshee, Mono May Be Dropped From Ubuntu Default
itwbennett writes "The Banshee music application, and Mono, the open source implementation of Microsoft's .NET framework, on which Banshee is dependent, may be excluded from the next release of Ubuntu. In 'a blog entry titled Bansheegeddon,' Banshee and Mono developer Joseph Michael Shields says the reasons given for the change are that Banshee is 'not well maintained' and 'porting music store to GTK3 is blocked on banshee ported to GTK3.' Other reasons mentioned but not in the session logs are complaints that it doesn't work on ARM. Ubuntu Community Manager Jono Bacon pointed out in a blog post that the decision to drop Banshee, Mono or other apps that are dependent on Mono has not been finalized. But the blogosphere is lit up with speculation that this is a deliberate move to exclude Mono because of its emulation of Microsoft .NET."
...that Banshee was made a default? ffs, make up your mind, Ubuntu people.
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I have Rhythmbox as default on 10.04 (Ubuntu and Lubuntu), and see no need for Mono. Is this an outbreak of uncharacteristic good sense in Ubuntu (but only a partial atonement for their Unity sins)?
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
fine by me. i always preferred rhythmbox.
So?
sig: sauer
i always uninstall mono and monoprograms after instaling ubuntu
Quickly, tell me what to think, Slashdot groupmind!
Whatever Ubuntu includes, they insist it fit on a CD (for better or worse.)
The Mono runtime libraries and Banshee together are over 15 megs. Then consider the size of Gtk+2, and the case to leave it off the disk makes a lot of sense.
(Of course once you've installed Ubuntu it's not very difficult to install Banshee, Mono, etc. on your own.)
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
Shut the fuck up, stupid.
This makes perfect sense. Almost nothing depends on mono anymore. Ditch the last holdouts, replace them with alternatives without the taint and move on. Besides, Ubuntu has made it clear they see tablets as THE future and tablets run ARM. So they really can't afford to offer a second class status to ARM and thus anything that isn't portable to it has to go from the default experience.
If they were removing mono from the repository or moving it to non-free or something there would be a story here, but they ain't so there isn't.
Democrat delenda est
I haven't had any issues running banshee in the Ubuntu chroot on my ARMv7 touchpad. What's the supposed problem?
For fuck's sake, some lunatic even ported MonoDevelop to the Nokia N900.
I'd bet dollars to doughnuts the real issue behind dropping Banshee has something to do with this.
Since when has Linux been about "production" code only in distros? Projects should, and have, made into distros based on demand, not based on whether they have an RTM stamp. Great example: apt-get install nodejs (unless you update apt, it installs an old version, no less)
I can get not installing it based on the fact that it targets libraries that drive for-profit philosophy, but at least call it that. Of course, then why is there still wine? samba? tsclient? All of these support and encourage Windows use.
The best thing about a boolean is even if you are wrong, you are only off by a bit.
At some fundamental level, I like C# more than Java, because it has some Lambda functionality which can lead to less boilerplate. mono isn't copying .net, because C# is a programming language outside .net - it is just that Microsoft for a long time was the only company making a compiler for it, since they made the language in the first place.
In terms of Banshee, I have likes and dislikes about it. It was a pain to get my media keys on my keyboard to reference banshee, and Banshee segfaults if it detects my iPhone, so I can't have it plugged it when starting Banshee. I feel that something like a basic music player can easily be written in C without needing all the huge project overhead of a C# / Java platform. Just have GTK+ as the GUI and some folder in the installation called codecs that you can throw some .so files of codecs not already in the system codecs for portability.
What is it about music players? Maybe because they attract inexperienced kids to do the programming?
There is not a single good one for Linux, none.
Songbird might have eventually gotten there but they abandoned the platforms that wanted them (UNIX-like system) for platforms that don't want or need them. They look doomed at this point.
Amarok works pretty well but the GUI is the most fucked up thing I have ever seen in a production application. Plus it has all that KDE/Qt bloat baggage.
Banshee, Rythembox, etc are all pretty crappy. Bad UI's, lack of features, ugly, etc.
A lot of people forget that when something is excluded from the default installation of Ubuntu, that doesn't mean that you can't install that feature later.
.. and spreading it, even when there is none.
I don't remember the link now, but Microsoft made an irrevocable promise not to sue implementations of .NET, under certain specified conditions.
looks like ubuntu finally dropped off the #1 spot in the rankings on the right hand column
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
sudo apt-get install banshee
Is it that fucking hard?
+1, this saves me time. And good riddance to Banshee, such a slow POS that is.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
When will they improve or give up on Unity?
Considering Microsoft's shamefull history, it's hard for me to fully trust Microsoft.
But I, for one, couldn't care less, actually. It's their distro, they can include/exclude whatever they see fit. Also, it's not like there isn't hundresds+ of other distros.
Or, you know, install it yourself.
Consistency is only a virtue if you're not a screw-up.
In case you have not noticed, Apple and MS are hyper-aggressively suing everything that moves. MS especially has been suing everything Linux either directly, or through MS proxies like Acacia.
Mono helps make Linux vulnerable to MS patent scams.
After nearly a decade, MS is still involved in the scox-scam. This in spite of the facts that linux is not infringing, and scox doesn't own the code anyway. Any steps linux can take to avoid patent parasites, like MS, should be taken.
Do you think Linux makers are wise to leave themselves open to scam patent lawsuits by Microsoft, or Microsoft proxies, like Acacia, or Intelectual Ventures?
Isn't Java ratified as an ECMA standard? Yet Google is being sued by Oracle for using Java.
Just because MS has no case does not mean that MS can not cost you many millions in legal fees. Are you familiar with MS-funded scox-scam?
lit up with speculation that this is a deliberate move to exclude Mono because of its emulation of Microsoft .NET
No, once apply Occam's Razor and ignore the conspiracy angle it's quite obvious that it's "a deliberate move to exclude Mono because" it sucks dead dingo kidneys.
(Cue the pedants who will argue into the wind about an improper usage of Occam's Razor. a.k.a. Howler Monkeys)
XML is a known as a key material required to create SMD: Software of Mass Destruction
Nice, never thought of that before. "After this operation, 75.8 MB disk space will be freed." Au revoir mono. :)
And it was nice to find out Gnote, a C++ replacement for Tomboy.
`echo $[0x853204FA81]|tr 0-9 ionbsdeaml`@gmail.com
You had me at Bacon.
What?
I started as a Fedora user and since my classes require Ubuntu 10.04 LTS I've been experimenting with Ubuntu/Kubuntu 10.04 and the latest version that just came out on separate laptops. Since I rarely use Linux for multimedia I am not all that knowledgeable about the pros/cons of Banshee/Mono, but when I do want to play some media files on my Network Storage, I used the default player (Banshee) but it needed some plug-in that I had to download. Instead of doing that though and possibly stumbling upon with complications I decided to scrap Banshee and use VLC Media Player instead. It plays pretty much everything and is updated fairly frequently.
Also I use Eye of Gnome to replace that shitty photo previewer that uses Mono.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
There is hand wringing over software that plays dvd's (not rips, just plays), because there are people out there that don't want you to play a cd that you bought and have a receipt for on a computer that you bought and have a receipt for. Yet there is proprietary hell and a walled garden surrounding everything MONO, and its available? And for a while it was even a default include? I can see it as a 3rd party unsupported extra for people that want it, but I've never been one of them, and in no way can any of the applications that use it be described as 'a native app'. Its inclusion in Ubuntu makes Ubuntu a litigation target. We don't need MONO, its a hot potato, and while WINE is not an ideal solution, at least the technology is useful, effective, and doesn't have a million strings attached to an Intellectual Property Predator(tm). Sidious de Icaza's talents are wasted in developing and promoting it. It makes Ubuntu and other free software a litigation target, and wastes resources (time and talent) better used anywhere else. Stronger arguments than these have been attempted, and have failed. Sidious de Icaza is lost to the dark side. Its best for Ubuntu to drop it.
Mono has its uses - it could help people remove .Net dependencies from their software packages.
But for new software packages, choosing a Microsoft technology is a mistake. Microsoft calls free software an enemy - "cancer" to be "extinguished", so building on their technologies is folly, especially when there are lots of non-Microsoft languages and frameworks that we can use. The problems of software patents are only getting worse, so we need to prepare for the future by applying some caution today.
I hope this is indeed the real reason for taking Mono-dependent software out of Ubuntu.
http://en.swpat.org/wiki/Mono
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+1, this saves me time. And good riddance to Banshee, such a slow POS that is.
Seriously. When a music player decides it needs to be able to play DVDs, it's time to move on.
After even writing a howto on removing mono from Ubuntu... I have it installed now, so that I can have autopano-sift to use with Hugin.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Ubuntu dropping mono is proof that there is a God and He loves us.
My apologies to Benjamin Franklin.
vi +
Or at least make it click click go away gimmbe back gnome?
YES! YES! DEATH TO MONO!!!!!
Canonical can't seem to decide what to do with its selection of default software. I found an insightful comment from OMGUbuntu that I thought I should share:
To all newcomers - people here are very close-minded and can't handle complaints about Linux. Keep this in mind.
I wanted to play a list of finely normalized (volume-adjusted) tracks using both replaygain and crossfading.
Banshee and RB were very buggy with crashing, jumping to odd tracks w/o shuffle turned on, even playing multiple tracks at the same time. I consider them unusable for anything.
And then Amarok, my old regular from the KDE 3 days, had been lobotomized to the point of being unable to handle normalization. But I had switched to Gnome and didn't want to use 150+ MB extra ram to play some audio tracks anyway.
I had to resort to a very obscure program called Aqualung and forget replaygain data, using AL's special gain calibration system instead.
In iTunes, the exercise is extremely simple and reliable. The only player that comes close to matching it in features and reliability is Amarok 1.x, but the FOSS community decided to replace it with something "clean" and easy for new project members to figure out. Bad tradeoff.
isn't dot net dead?
Paul: Father... father, the sleeper has awakened! - Dune
Should've just used Java for Banshee and been done with it
ARM isn't like x86. Optimizing for one ARM vs optimizing for another ARM can differ GREATLY. Most Linux distributions are standardizing on older ARM cores (though I imagine there will be a lot of ARM8 64-bit chatter now) this is because they are the lowest common denominator. Once of the greatest shortcomings of Android at this time is the wide support for limited ARM cores. iOS is strong because the build environment is tuned to optimize for the feature set which Apple knows is present on the iPhone and iPod devices.
I have hand optimized several programs for several different ARM processors. You always have to have multiple versions to make it run well. There's the C version for crappy old ARM cores not worth optimizing for (and many phones ship with these), there's the ARM with floating point version, the ARM without floating point, ARM with NEON, ARM without NEON, ARM with big fast multipliers, ARM with small painfully slow multipliers, ARM with hardware division, ARM without hardware division, ARM. ARM with MMU, ARM with emulated MMU, ARM without MMU.
The fact is, any company can grab an ARM core from ARM and slam the thing in a chip unchanged, but many companies (especially Marvell and probably NVidia) add their own IP to the mixture to make their chips faster than others. ARM processors are meant to be small and low power. You can fit a full ARM7 core into the tiniest corner of an FPGA. It'll have a REALLY slow multiplier and divider since that specific version doesn't need a pyramid multiplier (which is enormous). It will be a bare bones CPU which works. On the other hand, you can also put an ARM7 core onto an FPGA, use every single gate in the biggest bad boy Altera has to offer and have a CPU which runs like greased lightning. Things like SIMD pyramid multipliers with adders to optimize multiply and accumulate. Big ass memory busses capable of 256 bit wide external memory accesses on DDR-3 or even GDDR5. The options are unlimited.
This is why you've only scraped the tip of the iceberg. Mono, if implemented properly for ARM would enumerate the capabilities of the processor and memory subsystem and optimize code for the platform it is running on. Personally, I still believe that all ARM Linux distros should be compiled for the phone they're meant to run on and all code sent to those devices should be in an intermediate language whether it's CIL, Java byte code or LLVM based. ARM would be a true contender against x86 then... on the performance front at least. I am still pretty convinced that if you implemented a full Intel grade ALU on an ARM, ARM would lose its edge in power consumption.
Banshee is a pile of wank! cant they just use VLC and be done with it..?
It's amazing to me that so many idiots (tech-savvy idiots, that is) went to support this insanity. dotCRAP is the Java Microsoft could not have but they still pushed it with all of their might exactly the way a spoiled child wants something even when it doesn't make sense anymore. Now they can trash all of that and wait for their Ma$ter to devise a new idiocy to work on.
Mono has its uses after all: it keeps idiots off relevant FOSS projects.
Tomboy is actually great and I do not even know of any commercial alternative. It has fantastic UI design. I could live with gnote, but also know that it lives off of Tomboys ideas.
Here an answer from banshee dev worth reading: https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-desktop/2011-November/003398.html
Ubuntu decided with its mighty sword that henceforth NAY to the mono. NAY to the banshee.
And the bloggers that nobody actually read had went forth with a great gnashing of teeth as they wont to do.
The two groups stirred in great controversy fighting through the night.
And the rest of Linux land could give less than two shits of a fuck.
sudo apt-get install banshee It doesn't really matter to me what they put in the default anyway. I am currently running Xubuntu with the dolphin file manager because I prefer it to Thunar, by the way. You can install whatever you want with almost no effort at all. incidentally, Canonical generates news/blog buzz by constantly announcing these changes as if they really matter.
if your life is such a big joke then why should I care?
I like rythmbox better any way so banshee doesn't bother me but the loss of tomboy i think will be a little annoying. Thats said
sudo apt-get install tomboy
not really the hardest thing in the world
The Oracle JRE is no longer in *any* Linux distributions' repositories. Oracle changed the license terms so the only place you could download the JRE from was the Oracle website. The GNU JRE is more than adequate for running Java apps, however, and is included out of the box in Ubuntu.
I had a sig once. It was lost in the great storm of '09.
Agreed. I do not use Mono at home, on machines I control, for exactly this reason. It's dangerous and it helps Microsoft, which, though I must use its products at work, I have no great wish to do. On the other hand, I do advocate including Mono support for the .NET applications my employer builds. Doing so opens up at least the possibility that parts of our .NET code base could be ported to non-Microsoft platforms in the future, and, if nothing else, at least helps us to identify and hopefully avoid functionality specific to Windows (or worse, to specific Windows versions). Let me say here for purposes of full disclosure that I do think .NET is a pretty nice platform for Windows development. If a truly open-source, non-patent-encumbered, and complete (WPF) implementation existed, I'd be using it on other platforms too. It then could potentially evolve into true competition for Java. As it stands now, the platform does tie us more tightly to Windows and to Microsoft than what I consider safe, but I do hope someday that might change.
Nonaggression works!
I just don't understand all the mono hate.
C# is a good language. Seriously.
The mono VM is quite good as well.
But the real beauty of mono is turning Microsoft's "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" against them. Think about it!
What people still use that pile of crap ?
Sheesh !
Step one of a good post install process is to remove Mono (sounds like a disease) from your Ubuntu instance. That includes Tomboy.
Good, GTK+ compliant replacements exist for every Mono based application foisted on the Linux community by Microsoft/Novell. Remember: Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. They had some fooled for a while (Abraham Lincoln had something to say along those lines) but that seems to be falling by the way now.
Good riddance.
Samba & tsclient inter-operate with Windows machines using their default protocols. Mono like Wine are patent-dangerous attempts to obsolete needing Microsoft Windows for the closed standards they target.
Open, patent-free standards eliminate vendor lock-in as competitors (including FOSS) catch-up. Free software fits sometimes and improves until it fits more. Proprietary software monopolies can only exist as vendors of closed standards.
Science & open-source build trust from peer review. Learn systems you can trust.
What bugs me about Mono in Ubuntu is their decision to include only one runtime.
You have to jump through hoops to get .NET 2.0 and .NET 4.0 running on the same machine.
If removing Mono from the list of official packages makes it easier to do parallel installations, I'm all for it.
When cryptography is outlawed, bayl bhgynjf jvyy unir cevinpl.