After about four hours last night, I had the pleasure of setting up the latest version of Kubuntu on Microsoft's Virtual PC 2007. The install wasn't too bad at all, and I had juked myself on setting up the network connection. I realized after a while that I had to manually enable the network card and set up MS's software to share it's connection. Once I did that, it was off to the races!
The Abande program needed a little messaging, all for the better with a few hard-coded slashes and removing the Microsoft.VisualBasic namespace from the project. Even after doing that, I will still need to bundle the Microsoft.VisualBasic.dll from the .NET framework by hand for Linux because Mono needs it. I guess on the Visual Studio 2005 compiler, it puts the Visual Basic reference in there regardless of whether you really used it or not. Annoying, but by the end of the day, it was cool to see Abande running on a Linux box. The Mono team has done a ton of work and I was genuinely shocked that it wasn't harder to put all this together. Granted, Abande is one of the better programs to port over due to its relatively small size and few external dependencies, but an impressive technological accomplishment nonetheless.
Abande will have another release this weekend. The short list of modifications...
- Creating another setup package for Linux (at least Ubuntu/Kubuntu)...
- Adding German to the list of official languages (thanks Dieter)...
- Moving the skin definitions to a separate file for each skin instead of part of the main setting path.
- Added settings to make the lines thinner on the board as well as making the pieces a little easier to make out on the larger stacks.
We'll see where development goes from there.
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