Linux

I ran into a curious problem for a side problem of mine where I had some information in PDF files, both text and images.  What I want to do is display the information from the PDF’s on a mobile (Android) device.  PDF isn’t exactly a mobile friendly format, so I got the idea use HTML.  The next trick then becomes how to get the content out of the PDF’s I want into HTML.  Tux to the rescue!

Most who know me are aware that, despite being a .NET developer and a Microsoft MVP, I’m a bit of a Linux freak at heart.  I actually prefer Linux to Windows.  Linux has come a long way in the past 18 years, although I’ve only been tinkering with it off and on for the past 9 years or so.  I will admit that perhaps Linux on the desktop isn’t quite there for the average consumer, but for me it.  And, when it comes to servers, there is no question:   use Linux unless you’ve got a pretty compelling reason to run Windows.

Joe starts polling to see what people want to talk about.  Most seem to be interest the libraries for Mono (being that they also work on Windows/.NET.  So, Joe starts talking about libraries for/from Mono.

1. Mono.Cecil.  For all your reflecting and assembly modification needs.
2. Mono.Addins.  I’ve been looking at this off and on today, and I have to admit it looks pretty intriguing
3. Mono.Rocks:  Handy extension methods.
4. Mono.Zeroconf: Zero configuration networking library
5. DBus#:  A C# implementation of D-Bus.
6. MonoCurses: An API for console based applications
7. GTK# vs Windows:
   • My suggestion is to consider the target environment.  If you targeting Windows, stick with WinForms.  If you’re targetting Linux/Mac, go with GTK#. 
   • Another issue that might influence your decision is that the documentation for GTK# is pretty sketchy, not very good.
8. IOMap.  Turning this flag on, will help you with some of the cross-platform development issues.  This is a portable library that will help resolve things like directory seperators, case sensitivity in paths, and that sort of thing.

A short session, which isn’t bad.  Gives me a chance to float around to check out some other things.

Today I got a new hard drive for my web server, to replace the one that died back in February.  Hopefully the new 750GB drive will serve me as well as (or better) the old 200GB WD Cavair.  I must admit, I was a bit suprised at how cheap it was to get such a big HD.

The first order of business was to move my web site off it’s current home and onto it’s new, more permanent one.  I went about installing Ubunutu 7.10 64 bit, and them VMware server 1.0.4 on the new computer.  If you Google it, are a lot of articles on installing VMware on Ubunutu.  However, I did run into one stumbling block:  with 64bit Ubunutu you need one more dependency: ia32-libs