The Mono 2.2 LiveCD and VMware Appliance images have been released and contain a number of improvements over previous version. Aside from the improvements in Mono itself the new appliance includes the following:
- Moonlight 1.0 Beta 1 – the open source implementation of Microsoft’s Silverlight 1.0, installed in such a way that when 1.0 Final is released the update mechanisms in Firefox should allow you to update it.
- MonoDevelop 2.0 Alpha 2 – including integration with the Mono debugger and many other new features.
- Smuxi 0.6.3 – an excellent Mono-based IRC client, configured to log you into the
#monochannel. - GNOME Do 0.6.1 – the super-slick launcher thing we love, already running on your desktop.
The best thing about this version (for me mostly, but you enjoy some of the benefits) is that it was built using SUSE Studio. Studio is a service that allows people like me to customize and build appliance images easily and inspiringly quickly. It’s hard to put into words how much I love SUSE Studio.
Studio not only makes the process of building an appliance faster and easier, it makes things possible that weren’t possible before. See, the development cycle for appliances is normally long and painful. You have to make a change manually, modifying overlay files or writing first-boot scripts, then build the appliance image (which can take hours depending on how you are set up), test the change, and start all over again. You can try to do a bunch of changes at once but you have to go through that whole cycle several times. It can be very frustrating and costly so you end up choosing to not make the improvements you’d like to make. We made many of those choices in previous releases. But Studio is so fast and so easy that you can really just play! Try various approaches to solving your problem and see what works best.
Studio also facilitates customizing the appearance of your appliance.
How does Studio make building appliances so easy? Mainly, but not exclusively, through a feature called Testdrive. Testdrive allows you to test your changes immediately by running your appliance in a virtual machine, viewing the console in your web browser. You can also make changes inside Testdrive and then click on the Modified Files tab where you can see what what was changed and add it to the list of overlay files.
If you find a problem with the Mono 2.2 Appliance please file a bug and I will try to fix it. Thanks to SUSE Studio it won’t be so difficult to fix those bugs!
With the previous Live CDs, I was used to right click exes, then choose “Open With other Application…”, and pick “mono”. This option is no longer there. Is this intended?
Followup: I found out simply typing “mono” in the field at the bottom of the “Open With other Application…” does the trick, and then it’s added to the program list. But it’s not there by default.
Ah, good point. I totally forgot that one.
Alright.
Relatively off topic, but I’ve been told (on the Mono mailing lists/forums) that it’s possible for Linux distros to detect whether an exe is a .NET one, and then to tie them to Mono. However, I haven’t seen this behavior in either Ubuntu or OpenSUSE, although I would have expected OpenSUSE to be the first distro to have this feature out of the box.
Can you shed some light on this matter? Is this an optional feature or something? It may just make the Live CD a bit more user friendly for Windows users that are new to Mono.
Hi there,
Apparently, this Live CD is just that, a Live CD. It is not an installation CD anymore (Mono 2.0 Live CD was also an installation CD).
Unless I am missing something, the Live Install icon is not on the desktop anymore and running the command manually is not successful (no such client module live-installer).
Would it be difficult to put the live installer back on the image? I used to use that to create a nice VirtualBox machine, and I know I’m not the only one who did it that way.
Thank you so much in advance.
Just wanted to mention that you may have difficulties with this new mono appliance. I downloaded it today and my mouse is stuck inside of the vmware window as if vmware tools isn’t installed. I filed a bug and received some helpful feedback about why this is happening, https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=466591 I’ve tried the suggestions but it seems quite difficult to get the actual vmware-tools installed since I can’t seem to actually remove the offending vmware open tools packages without prompting an install of other vmware packages and xen etc.
@Stifu
I’ve been looking into that issue. Apparently whatever method GNOME is using to detect the type of a mono executable is coming up with application/executable rather than anything more windows or .NET specific, so I haven’t found a good way to open a mono executable from the file browser. We could use the binfmt kernel module stuff to execute CLR executables, and openSUSE has discussed doing that, but it would have to be able to distinguish between something that should be executed with wine and something that should be executed with mono. Some systems are able to execute Java .jar files this way, for instance.
@Sylvain
We are considering adding the live installer again. The main reasons it was removed on this release were that we didn’t take time to test that feature and didn’t have a lot of confidence in it and we would have to have those packages included on the LiveCD but not on the VMware appliance. On this release there is actually only one difference between those two images: a single firstboot script that basically only adds a swap file to the VMware appliance and tunes a file system parameter.
In theory you should be able to just add the yast2-live-installer package and then run the installation. I would be interested in hearing back from you if that works.
@Sylvain
Actually the best way to create a VirtualBox machine is to download the VMware appliance and use the .vmdk from it as your disk in VirtualBox. The appliance knows nothing specific to VMware until it’s booted the first time and there is nothing special in the .vmx file that you would need to tell VirtualBox about. Please try that method and let me know if it doesn’t work. I’ve done it many times in the past and it worked very well for me.
I remember I tried the VMware way first thing with the last Mono LiveCD (2.0.1) and it failed miserably because of some HDD identity strings being messed up (I don’t remember exactly to be honest, it just did not work out of the box). That’s why I resorted to install from the LiveCD.
I followed your advice though, and gave the VMware thingy another shot with this new version and it seems to be working very well. So, all in all:
THANK YOU
A lot of the asp.net applications only work on the front page. The rest of the pages give a file not found error although the files are all there (I can view their sources.)
I assume you’re referring to the LiveCD? We use xsp on the LiveCD instead of apache and
MONO_IOMAP=allis not set for xsp in the 2.2 appliance. This causes problems with applications that look for the wrong case of a file.In the 2.4 appliance we set the variable, so that problem should go away.