Mono (Not the desease) and Linux (Not the virus).

I've recently re-installed linux onto my computer, after finally getting round to destroying my old, broken installation (incidentally, I also attempted to install Mac OSX with the help of Mr Joice, who has done it before. That didn't work out well.) . I think the most important thing for me is that it's now... ooh, about 4 days until my 18th Birthday - when I will be recieving one of those snazzy EeePCs with linux on. I haven't used Linux in a while, but I wanted to get back into the swing of programming for it, so I burned a lovely DVD of xubuntu, using the DVD burner that I really SHOULD return to my friend, and installed it into the gaping void that used to contain Mac OSX. One almost destroyed computer and a huge amount of worry over the loss of countless hours worth of inadequately backed up source code later, I had a happy new linux installation on my computer.

On the right you'll notice that I've got all my old folders from Windows. There are two ways to do this - when you install ubuntu in a "Partition" you can ask it to copy all of your Windows files and settings for you. That's not what I did, though. I was hardcore and I created some "links" within linux itself. Linux supports something called "Symbolic links", which anyone who has done any web site administratin will probably be familiar with. These links act like any other folder on the hard-drive would - when I'm browsing for something using my Word program, there's no way of telling that these are links and not actual folders.

Linux has lots of nice little features like this, which can be very rewarding for those with the patience to use it as an operating system. You see, the problem with Linux is that with me, and with many other users, on first use it scared me shitless silly. It still does sometimes. My girlfriend recently left a linux live-cd disk in her computer by accident, and was terrified when white text started scrolling across her screen and it asked her which layout she wanted her keyboard to be in. She wrote on the disk "creepy, virus imitating linux".

Even when it's not terrifying people, Linux isn't really that useful at the best of times. For example, my particular environment doesn't have the built in ability to take screenshots. Lord knows why, but at length found a guide on google that instructed me on how to add screenshot functionality using tools that were already present on my computer. That added about 15 minutes of wasted time to the creation of this article.

That said, it's getting better. For example, when I first started using linux, if you wanted to connect to a wireless network you would need to click "Application -> Accessories -> Terminal" and do something like:

sudo iwconfig eth0 ESSID ZyXEL KEY s:xcs0fs8df232

and then:

sudo dhclient eth0 up

That's not really very user friendly and it didn't always work either.

Luckily, there's now a little button of a signal bar in the top right of the window that you can press to open the wifi selection toolbar.

Perhaps my favourite advance that has been made in the linux operating system since I last used it, though, is the Mono .net runtime. This program allows certain applications that have been written for windows to load under linux. It is NOT an emulator, however. The .net framework, which is an idea pretty much stolen from Java by Microsoft, doesn't produce binary code that can be understood by the computer. It instead produces binary code that can be read by a program that IS understood by the computer. It seems pretty pointless, but it essentially means that if a program has been compiled for .net, it can be run on Linux, Windows, Solaris or OSX. It's hard to get excited about if you've never had a play with .net before, but essentially it means that I can now develop applications using the excellent tools provided by Microsoft for windows, and then log into linux, and without any modifications, recompilations, bugs or incompatibilities, run my program as if it had been written for linux all along. On the left you see a program that I wrote to watch the size of the files within a selected folder in real time. It is part of the Project II library, and it works seamlessly.

This kind of interoperability, without the messing around, tinkering and general tomfoolery required by many similar projects, has impressed me most and given me hope once again for the future of the linux operating system.