Colin Charles Agenda

Miguel de Icaza from the Mono project, tells us more about Moonlight, and where the Mono project is headed, at LugRadio Live USA 2008.

- shows us about Silverlight 1.1 (Moonlight is the Mono equivalent)
- works a charm in Firefox, but there’s issues with the implementation in IE (something JavaScript related)
- Demos the chess application
- Microsoft will provide a Media Pack (they will incur the licensing costs for the media codecs) for all Moonlight users on Linux. Microsoft will also provide regression test suites, and complete specifications for implementation. Novell will deliver a 100% compatible Moonlight and will support it on all major Linux distributions (contractually, only the top 3 Linux distributions - no mention of what the top 3 are). This is the Microsoft/Novell agreement, as of last September 2007.
- The codecs come with a restriction - you can’t use it outside Moonlight. Its only for the in-browser experience. If you use Totem, you’ll need to make use of gstreamer, etc…
- The MSPL is better than the X11 license. Miguel would like to change the Mono license to the MSPL, but everyone that hates him now, will hate him more because of the “Microsoft” substring! Why is the MSPL better? It has a patent clause, so that the code you use there, if covered by a patent, you will not be sued, ever. That in a way, is similar to the Apache license.
- Self-contained applications - traditional GNU software is spread out, quite unlike Mac OS X applications where you drag an application into the Applications folder, and everything is contained in one directory. Mono has an application guideline, where everything is also in one directory.
- Like all good demos, something broke. Miguel starts debugging on stage, and fixes the problem, and the demo works!
- “Programmers have no taste for design”
- “I have a roadmap, but I don’t think anyone gives a fuck, so lets just go to questions”
- How long will it take to get mixed-mode assembly working? If you are Chris Toshok, it will take 2 weeks. If you’re not, definitely longer. He spoke to Dan Kegel from the WINE project :) Patches are being accepted… The aim is to allow WINE to run Windows applications on a fully open source stack

Technorati Tags: lugradio, lugradio live usa, miguel de icaza, mono, moonlight, microsoft, patents, media pack, licensing, codecs, mspl, wine

MySQL Workbench has a beta out! No idea why its version 5.0.9, but its highly exciting. This software existed before, but this is quite unlike its predecessor. One snag for me is that it is Windows-only at the moment, with Linux and OS X versions to follow suit.

However, due to excitement, I decided to try running it on Linux, anyway.

Seeing that it is a .NET application, I thought I’d pass it through MoMA (the migration analyser). Everything passed, so I got excited. Running mono MySQLWorkbench.exe however, led me to a failure:
** ERROR **: Method ‘<Module>:<CrtImplementationDetails>.DoDllLanguageSupportValidation ()’ in assembly ‘/home/byte/Downloads/MySQL Workbench 5.0.9 OSS Beta/wb.wr.dll’ contains native code and mono can’t run it. The assembly was probably created by Managed C++.

So I hopped onto #workbench on Freenode, where the MySQL Workbench crew hang out, and spoke with Mike Zinner (team lead for this software). He mentioned to me that it probably wouldn’t work, as there are some 3rd-party FOSS controls that rely on Win32 API calls. Immediately, I think of WINE.

Running it against WINE, I get an error basically telling me I need Mono for Windows:
fixme:actctx:parse_manifest_buffer root element is L”asmv1:assembly”, not <assembly>
install the Windows version of Mono to run .NET executables

Workbench fails on me in WINE

Downloaded mono-1.2.5.2-gtksharp-2.10.2-win32-0.exe, installed it via WINE, and then made another attempt at running Workbench, only to see a similar failure, this time in GUI form.

A little disappointed, I think the next option is to run Workbench in a virtualized Windows environment. KVM immediately came to mind, with only one minor snag - while its full CPU hardware virtualization, it doesn’t virtualize the graphic layer as well (it just emulates a graphics card, like it does for pretty much every device). Windows will see a Cirrus Logic card, from ages ago. This means, no OpenGL support, which Workbench really needs (otherwise, it drops down to software rendering, and becomes much slower).

However, there is hope. Check out VMGL, which is OpenGL Hardware 3D Acceleration for Virtual Machines. This should work with Xen and KVM, so I’ll give it a twirl, and see how it goes.

If you’re on a Mac, I am told that VMWare Fusion does not do OpenGL, so you’re out of luck there. However, Parallels does - so let that be your virtualization option of choice, if you’re on an Intel Mac.

Next stop, to go out and buy Windows Vista - wish me luck!

Technorati Tags: mysql, workbench, mysql workbench, moma, .net, mono, wine, opengl, virtualization

I’ve recently started doing more development locally on my Ubuntu (Feisty Fawn) laptop (as opposed to being logged in via ssh to various machines, generally running Fedora), and have noticed some quick snags.

Ruby Gems
They’re currently installed in /var/lib/gems/1.8 which is not in your PATH. So if for example, you use cheat, you’re not going to find it. Fix it via adding /var/lib/gems/1.8/bin to your PATH (my .bashrc has it looking such as: PATH=$PATH:$HOME/bin:/var/lib/gems/1.8/bin)

Mono, and System.Windows.Forms
I have no problems with Mono and .NET related applications, normally. I run Tomboy (which I like, a lot), I can fire up f-spot, and when I need to Beagle runs fine too. But of late, I’ve had to run an application that required System.Windows.Forms, aka WinForms. Little did I know I’d need to install the winforms stuff, so a sudo apt-get install libmono-winforms* fixed this for me.

This still hasn’t made my required application run properly, but I’m now a step closer to finding out compatibility with Windows-based .NET applications and Mono. All thanks to the useful Mono Migration Analyzer (MoMA). Hat tip to Ditesh for pointing me to MoMA.

Technorati Tags: gems, ruby, path, mono, winforms, system.windows.forms, moma