[Update: Sorry to say, and no suprise here, but I didn't win. :( I'm completely and utterly bummed. I guess I can perk back up when I get my booby-price.]
Thanks to Carl and Rory, I’m one of the final 10 for the Tablet PC Giveaway over there on .NET Rocks. I reaaalllllllly want to get my hands on one of these bad boys. I’m giddy with excitement on the possible off-chance that I might win. Tune in to tonight’s show to find out.
Our very own Jon Henning will be presenting Introducing the DotNetNuke Portal Framework at tonight’s CNUG meeting. Jon is a Senior Consultant with Solution Partners, a DotNetNuke Core Team Member and the inventor of the SolPart ASP.NET Menu Control. Surely an event not to be missed.
The meeting will be held at Microsoft’s Downers Grove office and will begin at 7PM. If you plan an attending, please register at the CNUG website (needed for security purposes). If anyone is interested in participating in any of the CNUG committees, the committees will be meeting at 6PM. As always will all CNUG meetings, free pizza and soda for all!
I plan on coordinating a contingent to toss back a few and have a little geek talk at a local watering hole afterwards. Everyone is more than welcome to join us - the more the merrier.
It's pretty hard to get Mono installed if you can't even get Linux up and running. On account of Mono 1.0 not including a package for the Mandrake distro, I made the decision to install Red Hat's Fedora Core 2 (more). After a few hours of waiting for the system to install I was finally ready to login and apply the recommended patch for running in Virtual PC. When I booted up the Fedora OS and entered my 'root' login, I was inundated with 'Segment Fault' error messages. That's okay, I thought, because the step-by-step instructions to apply the patch said you could ignore these. Just try and execute the command again and they should go away. (Well, isn't that special)
The gist of the instructions is to copy a ZIP file from another partition that contains the patched kernel. To do this, you need to have Samba running in order to connect to a Windows share. Step (37) of the patch instructions states to run the following command: 'ifup eth0 boot'. When executing this command, I once again ran into my little friend the 'Segment Fault' error. The problem this time around was that it wasn't going away. After 20+ attempts I was pretty convinced that this command wasn't going to execute at all. I don't even pretend to know what the 'ifup' command does but I'm guessing it has something to do with initializing my network card. This would seem to pose a problem in executing step (38), the samba client.
I found another suggestion that says if you have problems with your network card to burn the patch file to a CD. Fine. I did that, but now the system won't let me mount my Cd-ROM. So much for that idea. I've basically given up on this exercise because I feel like I've wasted way too much time trying to get Fedora Core 2 installed.
My last and final step to this experiment gone awry is to take the advice of Andres Bastidas who was kind enough to post a comment on my earlier post on how to get Mandrake to play nice with the Fedora Mono 1.0 package. I'm a bit skeptical but I'll give it one last shot. Something tells me I'll be heading back to my Whidbey work sooner than later. I should have never ventured away in the first place.
As I'm sitting here waiting for Linux to finish installing, I thought I'd send out a plug for the MSDN Events team.
Jacob and his cohorts will be presenting the next installment of MSDN Events to the masses starting in mid-August. Check the MSDN Events site to see when they'll be coming to your neck of the woods. The event promises to be chock-full of great technical content including:
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Building Custom Controls with ASP.NET: Learn how to author server-side ASP.NET custom controls to easily create reusable user interface elements for your Web applications. See how to gain granular control over caching, use control designers, render your controls, and handle postback events.
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Microsoft ASP.NET 2.0 Overview: Discover the significant advances that ASP.NET 2.0 will offer to Web application developers to dramatically reduce the number of lines of code required for common tasks. Explore new features such as Personalization, Master Pages, Navigation Controls, and Web Part customization, as well as productivity enhancements in Visual Studio 2005.
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InfoPath with VS.NET: Experience the flexibility of XML data-sharing with Microsoft Office InfoPath 2003. Learn how its new Service Pack 1 feature enhancements will help developers and users get more out of InfoPath, and how the InfoPath Toolkit for Visual Studio® .NET will allow developers to easily create, debug and build InfoPath solutions using managed code |
For the Chicago folk, look for a .NET Pub Club to be organized around the Chicago visit on August 19th.
For the Pacific Northwest peeps, you'll be happy to hear (as if you haven't already) that Rory is assuming the duties of MSDN Developer Champion for the Pacific Northwest region. Congratulations on the new job, Rory!
With the release of 1.0 and the fact that I have oh so much time in my life to take on something new, I've decided to finally give Mono a whirl.
I've been in and out of the Unix/Linux world for the past 10 years or so. I spent a good 2 years in the Unix world when I was fresh out of college and since that time, I've gone through 3 or 4 exploratory ventures into the Linux world. I'm ready for my next venture into the Linux world because this Mono thing is very interesting to me.
So where do I start this little venture? Well... I need a Linux distro. Which one? I have no idea.. there are so many. I spent the first hour or so investigating different Linux options. I came across DistroWatch.com which lists the top 10 distributions. Mandrake was at the top of the list so I decided to give it a try.
After downloading 4 CDs worth of bits I was ready for the install. I will have to admin, the Mandrake install was pretty easy. It still took quite a while to complete but pretty simple none the less. Once the install was complete, I was ready to run the coveted XWindows. Doh! What's this? Why is my screen all out of whack and distorted??? I'm installing Linux in a Virtual PC image on my Dell C840. As it turns out, XWindows defaults to a 24bit color depth whereas Virtual PC only supports 16bit. I do some digging around and figure out how to configure the color depth from a command-line tool and I'm ready to run XWindows again. Voila! I'm up and running.
I proceed to the Mono project site to download the bits. Unfortunately I don't see a package for Mandrake. There hasn't been a package for Mandrake since the 0.29 release of Mono! Great, now what? Do I try a fudge a Red Hat package into Mandrake? Will it work? How do I even attempt to do it? Not one to waste time on trying to fudge something that I don't know will even work, I decided to try installing Red Hat instead. Why I didn't check Mono's project site in the first place is beyond me. I'm not quite used to this multi-distro problem we have with Linux and I don't quite enjoy it either.
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While I'm on the topic of multi-distros... how can Linux succeed in the consumer world with so many different options of Linux? From what I can tell, certain programs only work with certain distros. They don't necessarily translate well from one distro to another. Red Hat seems to have the lion share, from what I can tell, but everyone has their own preference. Am I missing something here? Does it really matter?
</commentary>
So here I am, installing not Red Hat, but Fedora Core 2. Pardon me, but did I miss the boat when Red Hat decided to rename their “free“ distro to Fedora Core? I prefer to work with something called Red Hat. 'Fedora Core' sounds kind of cheesy if you ask me. I'm up to a whole 12% complete and I'm about 30 minutes into the process with 1 hour and 14 minutes to go. Ugh. I happen to be stuck in the 'linux text' install on account the 'Fedora Core 2' install launches the graphical install under XWindows which is defaulted at 24bit color depth, just like the Mandrake install. Apparently I have to follow the instructions at https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=119838#c18 to get 'Fedora Core 2' up and running under Virtual PC. Hopefully I'll be ready to download Mono 1.0 in the next 1 hour and 10 minutes and 35 seconds.
Stay tuned.