Meanwhile, the open-source alternative to Microsoft’s .NET framework, Mono, had been making steady progress. It had finally reached a stage where I felt it deserved serious testing (read: playing with). Unfortunately Mono is not well supported under FreeBSD due to some architectural issues that I’m not familiar with in detail. Thus, it seemed my only option was to explore a Linux based distribution.
Having used Debian briefly in the past, I felt tempted to select that operating system again. However, Debian in my experience required quite a lot of time to set up in a satisfactory way, in part due to the ever-present package dependancy nightmares that most Linux distributions suffer from in varying degrees when complex software packages like desktop environments enter the picture. I decided, instead, to give the latest Fedora Core release a test run.
I downloaded the DVD and burned it — the installation went flawlessly, and I was greeted by a nice graphical login screen. Although I’m a bit of a KDE fan, I decided this time to install only GNOME to conserve disk space. GNOME is, I believe, better supported under Mono at the present time than KDE is.
As you may be aware, Fedora Core is a popular community developed operating system based on Red Hat. Back in the days of the last Red Hat releases, a decision was made to improve consistancy across desktop environments by providing default settings and themes in both KDE and GNOME to deliver a uniform user experience. This is something I took issue with and I am still not entirely happy with this decision, even though in general I applaud efforts to improve usability and consistancy in Linux. Nonetheless, as this was to be my server box — sitting alone in a cupboard — the user interface was of minor importance.
Fedora Core provides a number of useful applications for configuring common services, such as Samba and FTP. This went fairly well. I had no time or desire to learn how Linux managed firewalling (having invested significant time doing the same for FreeBSD once), and chose to use the excellent graphical configuration tool known as Firestarter. It provides nice wizards and dialogs to configure IP masquerading (NAT) as well as packet filtering. As Firestarter launched, it output a message in the console from which it was launched to the effect of having detected NETFILTER. I was somewhat concerned that this was a non-standard firewall tool, but as was pointed out to me, iptables is actually used for the filtering. Within a matter of minutes, the firewall was configured the way I wanted to (with appropriate port forwarding) and Firestarter had automatically modified the rc.d init scripts in order to auto-launch during each boot-up. After minor hurdles, I also had Samba up and running for easy file sharing between my Windows XP machine and my FreeBSD machine.
I was now anxious to install the software I was interested in — Mono, in particular. I initially tried the traditional route; using rpm. I had downloaded all of the Mono packages and tried to install them one by one. Unfortunately, my worst fears came true — a number of packages were missing and the installation could not continue. I then discovered another option for package management which had surfaced on this platform in recent years — YUM. YUM is an automatic package dependancy resolver and downloader. With minimal effort, I was able to download Mono from their YUM repository. The next step was downloading MonoDevelop to provide a somewhat nicer interface to Mono and its documentation. Unfortunately a dependancy problem surfaced again, but after a quick Google session I was able to find a solution (which involved re-installing the Mono packages — again, using YUM). I finally had Mono up and running and could not resist compiling an Hello World application and try to run it in Windows. It worked flawlessly! I then tried the opposite — compiling another Hello World in Windows to run it in Linux using the Mono run-time. That, too, worked great.
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