Getting Mono on OLPC
Summary: we have not managed to get a useful Mono environment (Mono + GTK#) inside the OLPC image. (Without an additional external device, at least.)
see also: Why Mono
Andy has tried these:
- Using the Mono installer and using YUM.
In both cases, there was not not enough disk space.
- Install Mono (and perhaps our program) to a USB key.
We have had success with installing Mono on virtual 256Mb drive. The space used was 144Mb plus the 50Mb installer program. Here are the instructions for doing so. This method does not need UnionFS and may allow us to make a more cut-down version of Mono.
Here are some more ideas (some of these may be exceedingly dumb... I'm ignorant of Linux).
- Put the Binary Mono installer on a USB key, mount the key (we've done this mounting ing VMWare Player). Run the installer.
- Put the Binary Mono installer into the user partition, deleting material out of that partition if needed, and run it from there.
As the image stands, there is barely enough room to put even the binary installer on the root partition - and the unpacked install, even when run from an external disk is far too big. Also, we are not too keen on using the binary installer that is distributed with Mono anyway, as it comes with a lot of extra baggage. (A full IDE with API documentation for a start).
- Build our own image for the OLPC, with different sized partitions (i.e., more root partition, less user)
- Install Mono to the user partition.
These, and any option that involves giving more space to where Mono is installed may work, but may be disruptive on laptops which are already in use. (However, seeing as you are prepared to wipe the disk and start from scratch, this is certainly a possibility)
- Build our own distribution for the OLPC, perhaps not even based on Fedora, which we run off of a USB key.
- Build our own distribution for the OLPC, perhaps not even based on Fedora, which we install on the built-in flash ram.
Installing a completely new OS is certainly a possibilty, but it is pretty drastic and would quite possibly prevent the original applications from being used, and would lose us the nice stuff that has been built into OLPC (such as filesystem compression, clever power management etc.)
