Well, the plan to do something with Mono this weekend died...

On the other hand, I did download cygwin and set it up. Cygwin has a really nice "setup.exe". I think if every free software project had something like that, newbies would download more of it.

[RANT]

IMHO, a lot of the time, it's just the "getting started" part that quickly humbles entrepreneurial (sp?) hackers. I realize that often it's only a matter of changing a few lines in a text file, but who wants to go out of their way to find out which lines? Mr./Mrs. Newbie just wants to play with the software first, and then maybe he/she will consider looking at the code and interacting with the developers.

For example, so much software out there uses (or used to, before the onslaught of ".rpm", ".deb", and their ilk) a generic configure script and semi-generic makefile. Why has almost noone ever included an incredibly simple shell script to run those two in order?

File: RunMe.sh

#!/bin/sh
./configure && make

This would work for most everyone new to this stuff. I know. I was there at one time. Of course, you could always tell them to RTFM, but why purposely prompt more questions when you can answer many by making things more obvious rather than cryptic?

[/RANT]

Now back on topic...

Tonight, I downloaded the Mono source (mcs, gtp-sharp, mono). I tried to compile parts, but got nowhere for lack of certain libraries (libtool, glib). I'm working on those now, but I don't think I'll last much longer... *yawn*

Today was the first day of classes. I ought to be doing Russian right now... Oh well. Until the next time! Cheers!