Taking the Mono plunge
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.