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A Bare-Bones Linux+Mono+GUI Distro?
Posted by
timothy
on Tue May 27, 2008 11:10 AM
from the essentials-only dept.
from the essentials-only dept.
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?"
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Technology: Miguel De Icaza On Mono, Moonlight, and Gnome 328 comments
Knuckles writes "Austrian newspaper Der Standard continues its recent series of in-depth interviews with free software developers. This time they sat down with Novell's Vice President of Developer Platform, Miguel de Icaza of Gnome and Mono fame. The interview was conducted at GUADEC (GNOME Users' And Developers' European Conference).
Miguel talks mainly about Mono 2.0 and .Net 3.5 compatibility, enhancing the collaboration with Microsoft over Silverlight ('Moonlight' in Mono), and the larger political situation of Mono and Moonlight. When the interviewer asks whether Moonlight is only validating Silverlight on the web, Miguel gives a quite detailed answer that includes a possibly well-deserved swipe at Mozilla ..."
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Gentoo (Score:4, Informative)
Monoppix? (Score:5, Informative)
I haven't tried it yet but the description sounds about right.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Doing it himself seems like the best bet. Certainly if he's planning to develop a commercial product based on this, it's worth figuring out a custom distro that does exactly what he wants.
Ubuntu Server Edition (Score:5, Informative)
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Debian (Score:5, Informative)
Damn Small Linux (Score:3, Informative)
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
OpenSuse Vmware Image. (Score:4, Funny)
Try SuSE (Score:5, Insightful)
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... (Score:5, Informative)
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Look at Debian Live (Score:5, Interesting)
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 [monoppix.com] 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.
OK, I'll bite... (Score:3, Interesting)
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!
Tell us more (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
yeah, it's called... (Score:5, Insightful)
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
The following contains sarcasm: (Score:5, Funny)
Thank you,
-Rick
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Re:Don't. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Re:Don't. (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Don't. (Score:5, Informative)
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 [artima.com] 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
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Re:Don't. (Score:5, Informative)
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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