Permaculture Database

[jedd <jedd@progsoc.org>]

On Mon, 5 Nov 2007, Lawrence F. London, Jr. wrote:
> What is mono other than that awful common disease Mono...nucleo(as in
> core)...soft(Microsoft)

 Microsoft .NET .. is a framework (buzzword that means 'bunch of
 software that doesn't do anything by itself but provides lots of
 bits of software that you can tie your own software to').  Well,
 kinda sorta.

 Mono is a 'free' clone of .NET.  There are holy wars fought about
 such things, starting with 'is it really necessary to replicate MS's
 framework at all, given the numerous alternatives'.  But that one
 is moot now.

 Bits of mono - the core of it - is almost definitely patent free.  But
 there are other bits of it - addons, reverse-engineered bits, etc, 
 that may be encumbered by patents which may come back to bite
 you at some point in the future.

 I don't know anywhere near enough to identify or assess the various
 implications of this stuff for the casual DekiWiki user.

> I was thinking of trying to install it in my account on ibiblio but need to
> read more about it first.

 I spent an hour at work trying to get it installed from scratch, with
 no success.  And I worked my way through the instructions on my
 home computer last night for about 45 minutes, and still haven't
 got it up and running.

 They do publish it in a VMware archive - so you can download 250MB
 of DekiWiki virtual machine (a lump of data that pretends to be its
 own full computer) and run it under VMware Server ($-free), f.e.
 and this tends to be pretty straightforward.

 Few ISP's will provide the rights to do this, however.

 Jedd.