Below you will find pages that utilize the taxonomy term “Mono”
The State of Desktop Search on Linux
Desktop search is one of those techs that keeps coming back and never really sticking. At least that’s how it seems to me. Look at how giddy I was about Beagle back in 2006. And I tried it and it was, generally, pretty awesome. It really worked well. It was like the speed of locate without having to wait until the database was updated at midnight. And it could see into IMs, MP3 metadata, emails and office documents. Now? According the the official website it’s no longer under active development. Perhaps that’s because they met all their goals. And that’s fine, but pretty much everyone switched over to tracker around 2008. I’m not quite sure why - perhaps all the anti-Mono hatred that went on. Fedora doesn’t even ship with Tomboy or F-Spot anymore. They’re there in the repos, but they aren’t the defaults.
Moonlight - what's the big deal?
Hardly a day goes by that I don’t see an article on Linux Today about Moonlight and what a horrible person Miguel de Icaza is. So I thought I’d go ahead and do some exploration of what’s going on with Moonlight and Silverlight. First of all, what’s Silverlight? Check out the Silverlight article on Wikipedia. Basically, Silverlight is Microsoft’s answer to Adobe’s Flash. MS is pretty peeved they haven’t been able to get people off of PDF and onto their own format. They waited way too long while the rest of us realized that PDF is great if you want to make sure that the document you create is displayed the same way on everyone’s computer regardless of the fonts they have or which version of Office they have installed. (Or if they even have office installed)
First GUI Program! (I think)
I’m pretty sure this is the first GUI program I’ve ever gotten to a useful state. No source code yet, as a lot of the buttons don’t work, but the basic functionality does. It’s a GTK-based RSS reader. I did it based off of code in LXF# 91. They called theirs Chomp. Since Mono is Spanish for monkey, I called mine Monkey Bites. Enjoy some screenshots.

[LXF 89] RSS Reader complete
I’m including the file here. It’s just a command line RSS reader. The included readme file will tell you which parameters to pass it. It doesn’t really do a lot of checking or than for the words “sub” and “unsub”. It’s a pretty neat proof of concept. I’m not going to improve on it much at this stage because it’s going to be used in issue 91, I believe, to create a GTK application. It would be my first ever useful GTK application, so I’m pretty excited about it. RSS Reader
Second Mono Project in the bag
It was another toy program, although a bit more useful than last time. It reads through a directory and recurses through subdirectories to fine all txt files and builds up a cache. Then it searches those for any text you want to search for.
Perhaps I missed a subtlety, but it appears to only search on one character searches as opposed to a whole word.
Next issue begins a real program - an RSS reader. Since I have that issue, I think I’ll do it tonight and then turn in for the night.
Hello Bill
Just tested and, yes, for the small, uncomplicated Hello World program it works just fine on Windows XP. I just had to install .NET. (It took about 10 minutes….I don’t know why)
Monkey Business
After reading Linux Format Magazine (LXF) Issue #91, in which they used Mono to code a GTK gui, I decided to take up C# programming. I will follow along with the tutorials and gain another programming language under my belt. Today I started with LXF #87 and completed my C# “hello world” program. The syntax is interesting - it’s a cross between C and Java. Of course, that makes sense as it lists those as its predecessors. Python (and Perl) is still much quicker for short programs, but for complex ones C# seems to be the way to go. At least, a lot of neat Gnome projects have been created with C# such as Banshee, Tomboy, and f-spot.
Yay for Monkeys!
The title of this post is, of course, a play on words. The company Ximian has developed Mono, an open source competitor to MS’s .NET. Mono is spanish (and probably latin) for monkey. The reason I’m excited is that according to Gnomedesktop.org, Fedora Core 5 will have mono! This means we’ll get great new programs being coded in Mono such as F-Spot, a photo organization program, and Beagle, an AMAZING search tool on par with the search tool in the latest Macintosh. Basically, it indexes the file system in such a way as to be able to look through not only filenames, but also tags in photos, music, and documents. Beagle even searches through AIM logs created by Kopete and Gaim. But the COOLEST thing is that, unlike the search in Windows which takes forever, this is instantaneous since it’s always indexing your computer. In fact, there are demos you can see by clicking on the beagle link on the right-hand side of my blog, that show a search being conducted and as the author write stuff in his IMs, it appears in the search. I can’t wait for this to be available to us Fedora users!