Which distro to "go Mono" ?

Hi, I want to do some cross-platform ASP.NET and, of course, to test it on Linux (or even develop). I know Mono runs on Windows too, but I'd really like to check my apps on Linux anyway.

As I'm a Linux non-bee, which distro would you recommend? This is the eternal Linux-newbie question, which doesn't really have an answer, but in the context of Mono and ASP.NET, I thought I could get some useful opinions/resources in this forum.

Thanks!

NB: That'd be a dual boot with XP, if that matters..

iLoveLeTeePetit
Thursday, November 04, 2004

I can't help you but I am really curious about how well (if?) Mono works, so please post a summary of your experiences and impressions once you get somewhere.

PS there is a decent-looking O'Reilly Mono book out, one of the very very few Mono books.

NetFreak
Thursday, November 04, 2004

There's easy packages available for SUSE and Red Hat ( http://www.mono-project.com/downloads/ ).
Given that Mono is developed by Novell, who own SUSE, and the general quality of SUSE; I'd consider that.

Jon
Thursday, November 04, 2004

Sounds like reasonable..

I saw on suse.com(*) that the Professional 9.2 version ("Linux enthusiasts and developers worldwide use SUSE LINUX Professional - at home and on the road.") is about 90$.

Isn't SUSE free?

Do they charge that only for CD shipping, or for licence? Or maybe it's a support licence?

(*) http://store.suse.com/dr/sat4/ec_Main.Entry?SP=10007&SID=40017&CID=0&CUR=840&DSP=0&PGRP=0&CACHE_ID=0

iLoveLeTeePetit
Thursday, November 04, 2004

Question being actually: is it legal to get it free by FTP (*) and use it professionnaly?

(*)http://www.suse.com/us/private/download/suse_linux/index.html

iLoveLeTeePetit
Thursday, November 04, 2004

They do charge for Professional, but the Personal edition is absolutely free and available on many sites.
Here for example: http://www.linuxiso.org/distro.php?distro=2

Jon
Thursday, November 04, 2004

Usually the licence agreement for Personal editions precludes you from using it for Professional (commercial) work. The fact you can download them for free legally doesn't always mean that you can use them for free. Same thing with some of the quasi-free SQL databases.

NetFreak
Thursday, November 04, 2004

True but the stated purpose in the original question was test or development, not deployment.

Jon
Thursday, November 04, 2004

As the unanswered question, yes, it's legal to charge for Linux distributions.

If your Linux distribution contains commercial applications (like, for instance, SuSE Professional, or Lindows, or many others), which are not covered by licenses like GPL, then redistributing the ISOs could be a copyright violation for that software.

You could, in these cases, "pick apart" the commercial stuff from the GPL stuff and redistribute just the GPL pieces, but in practice, most people don't have the skill or patience to do such a thing.

Brad Wilson
Thursday, November 04, 2004

Oops, let me precise my purpose..: I need to test on Linux yes, but I'm planning to release and set the hardware for the -eventual- clients on Linux too (or windows if required for some reason). That's why I'm looking for a free distribution of Linux (with the right to install it for comercial purpose), and a cross-platform ASP.NET solution.

Is SUSE Personal meeting these requirements? If not which distribution to choose then?

NetFreak, you mentionned "quasi-free" SQL DBs.. I'm planning to use PostGreSQL as a free to download/free to distribute DB, can anybody confirm that it *is* actually free to distribute?

iLoveLeTeePetit
Friday, November 05, 2004

http://www.postgresql.org/licence.html

It's a BSD license, so, yes, it's free to redistribute.

Aaron F Stanton
Friday, November 05, 2004

I've written some utilities targeting the mono runtime. So far, Red Hat 9.0 has been the easiest distro to install mono on. Suse personal edition was missing A LOT of libs - I spent about 6 hours on rpmfind.net looking for stuff like -devel libs that were needed.

Hope this helps.

Nick Ruisi
Tuesday, November 16, 2004

While you are looking into free RDBs look into firebird as well.

Karel
Tuesday, November 30, 2004

  Recent Topics

  Fog Creek Home