Mono & SuSE

Over the holidays I tried again to get mono and monodevelop running under SuSE on a Virtual PC. (Note: the monodevelop website has been offline for at least a week. Apparently there are a number of worms targeting PHP vulnerabilities going around). The good news is: Service Pack 1 for Virtual PC seems to resolve all the kernel panics I saw a few months ago. The bad news: is nothing is ever easy in RPM land.

SuSE 9.2 seemed to work well with everything but mono, and I could not get both mono and monodevelop running even when building every piece scratch. My nix chops were just not up to digging out the root of the problem, so I stepped back a version.

SuSE 9.1 does work well, although monodevelop would only launch after I rebuilt icu from source. One oddity with SuSE is that it does not install any source control clients by default, even when you ask for a development setup. During the install you’ll have to dig out the Subversion client from the list of RPMs (if you want to build mono from source).

And now for some experiments…