Fedora casts Mono into outer darkness

By Sam Varghese
Thursday, 04 June 2009 06:27

Opinion and Analysis

Red Hat's community GNU/Linux distribution, Fedora, has decided to replace the Mono-dependent note-taking application Tomboy with Gnote in upcoming releases, according to a message posted to the Fedora Desktop mailing list.
Red Hat developer Matthias Clasen wrote: "I have now changed the default panel configuration in F12 to include Gnote instead of Tomboy, and changed comps to make Gnote default and Tomboy optional."

F12 refers to Fedora 12; the current version is Fedora 10. Gnote is a port of Tomboy in C++/Gtkmm and was recently released by former Novell developer Hubert Figuiere. There are fears around Mono that it may be subject to patent claims by Microsoft down the track.

"This won't replace Tomboy in existing installations, but new installations will get Gnote instead of Tomboy," Clasen wrote.

"This also means that Gnote should show up on the live CD (where we excluded Tomboy previously, due to no space for Mono)."

Mono is an attempt to create an open source clone of Microsoft's .NET development environment; the project was begun by Novell vice-president Miguel de Icaza who claims this will pull Windows developers over to GNU/Linux.

In the Fedora wiki, the removal of Mono from the live CD was noted. "Gnote is installed by default in GNOME for this release replacing Tomboy. Gnote is a port of Tomboy from Mono to C++ and consumes less resources. Gnote is both an applet that can sit in your GNOME panel as well as a individual application you can run within other desktop environments.

"Fedora Desktop Live CD excluded Mono in the last releases due to lack of space. Gnote will be installed by default in the Live CD as well in this release. Tomboy is still available as a optional alternative.

"If you are upgrading from the previous release you will not be migrated to Gnote and will continue to have Tomboy. It is easy to migrate to Gnote however as it shares the file format. This migration is not automatic. You can copy the notes from Tomboy to Gnote using the following command in your home directory "

Novell's community GNU/Linux distribution, OpenSUSE, recently took a similar step for Easy-LTSP, an application that is used to configure thin clients.