:: Metaj on Mono ::

:: Thursday, January 09, 2003 ::

Continued to bang my head against the "build the kernel yourself" thing. I have been able to make everything, but the bzdisk part didn't succeed, so I wasn't able to make a boot floppy. When I get another machine, I'll set up LILO or GRUB and get rid of the floppy problem.
Kind of cool that you can use xconfig to select a zillion params for what gets compiled into the kernel, but it is way beyond mainstream. Regardless of what others say, I still find Linux to be a hacker's hobby OS. Yes, there are production machines out there, but my wife, kids, mother, non-tech friends, etc. are still far better of on Windows.
BTW, why does everyone think Linux is so stable? In the past week I have had to reboot twice due to UI freezes -- suddenly the UI becomes completely non-responsive. I wait for a few minutes, etc., but finally have to reboot.
:: Jay Metaj 12:46 AM [+] ::
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Kernel compiling. Going to bed and check on it in the morning. Yehaa!
:: Jay Metaj 11:55 PM [+] ::
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Taking a detour tonight on building & patching the kernel. I'll try to patch sources up to 2.4.20, build, and attempt to boot. I boot from floppy (machine has XP, don't want to disrupt my families computer usage, etc) which will be good and bad. It will be good since I can always use my 2.4.18 floppy if this build doesn't work; it's bad since I have to correctly configure the new 2.4.20 floppy.
:: Jay Metaj 11:23 PM [+] ::
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Played around with several issues tonight. The main hang-up at this point is that I can't use NUnit or any of the mono tests.
Can't find any info on compiling NUnit20 on Linux boxes -- makefile refs csc.exe. How are the Mono:: team running the tests?
I'm going back to the beginning an re-doing many things as root. When I compile using my personal account, there are several errors, particularly with stat. Hopefully, rebuilding mono under /usr/src as root will resolve some of these issues.
:: Jay Metaj 12:58 AM [+] ::
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Upgraded kernel to 2.4.18-19.7.x (I think that's right). Someday I'm going to tinker with building the kernel from source so I can live on the bleeding edge.
After upgrading, I made a few minor improvements to my test app, compiled and ran it with mono. Not much interesting to report, which is good news. Now I will either sync & rebuild mono again, get the mono test apps running, or something else.
:: Jay Metaj 9:14 PM [+] ::
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I didn't work any last night, so I just tried to re-sync option from Friday night. Amazingly it actually worked. I have successfully built, installed, compiled a simple C# app, and executed it with mono tonight. All this in the span of about 20 minutes of sporadic work on this computer. Funny how things come together some times.
Have some other things to do tonight, so I'll have to pick up again soon.
:: Jay Metaj 8:29 PM [+] ::
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I think I've completely toasted my Mono config. Either that or someone made some bad CVS check-ins. I sync'd to the CVS tree and tried to build everything -- make fails in doc/mono/runtime.

Options:
* Blow away everything and start over
* Wait a few days, sync CVS again, hope somebody made some magical fix.
:: Jay Metaj 12:07 AM [+] ::
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'Make' seems to work, but 'make install' does not. I'm going to get some sleep for work tomorrow.

Tonight I learned more about Linux file security (chown, chmod, etc.) by removing my login account from root group. Pain and agony -- very slow going -- but may be worthwhile in the long-run.
:: Jay Metaj 1:22 AM [+] ::
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I am following H. Hettema's Beginner's from Mono Project site. So far I have successfully configured Mono package and am in the process of making and installing.
:: Jay Metaj 1:13 AM [+] ::
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In order to understand *nix base security, my login account is only a member of users group. Every time I make a little advancement (config, build, etc.) I have to spend a bunch of time decyphering errors, chmod'ing files and dirs, etc. There is probably a best practice for this kind of stuff, but I've just been giving r/w to Users group on pieces that I need. For this Mono stuff, I should probably have a group for devs which owns or has appropriate group permissions; regular users would only have read access.
:: Jay Metaj 12:51 AM [+] ::
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Spent a bit of time thrashing around with Mono on Linux. I'm still fairly confused since I'm very much a beginner on Linux. For example, tonight I figured out how to set and echo env vars, how to create sym links, etc. Seems like I'm still very much in Basics mode.
The good news is that I seem to have successfully built Mono using mono/doc/mono-build.sh.
:: Jay Metaj 10:40 PM [+] ::
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