[MonoDevelop] MonoDevelop does not start on Mint

[Mike Krüger]

Hi
> @Mike : Thanks! Why do I always have a feeling I am the only person on this
> planet, trying to do something whenever I actually try to do something on
> Linux, beside www browsing?
>
>    
You're not alone :) - the parallel mono script is in your inbox with a 
short introduction how to get the bleeding-edge monodevelop.
(The bleeding-edge monodevelop is stable - but I would recommend that 
you don't update frequently - if you have a version that works leave it 
and only update if you want a bug fix or maybe every 1-2 months).
> Shame on Mint developers then ;o) But ...Wait a minute? Should not
> MonoDevelop inform the user, upon startup, that something crucial is
> missing, in a nice dialogue, with a human readable message? And then
> gracefully exit. Yes? After all it dumps the message, alas to the command
> line. Ah, well ...
>
>    
In a perfect  world monodevelop would do that :). It's not crucial to 
have mono 2.6 - but older versions have a bug, it's like roulette when 
trying to start monodevelop there.
Monodevelop >may< get in an endless loop on mono 2.4 ... that's why we 
can't pop up a dialogue for this case :/
We could do a pop-up inform box at the first start up, if we find any 
libraries that are currently installed not well-suited for our program, 
but at the other hand we don't have that many people to test all 
available distributions/environments. And it's only a 'little' issue - 
IF the distributions would choose to have always the latest mono in 
their repositories. I know that linux mint always has the latest 
versions of java - every minor mini update gets ASAP into the deployment 
- but it's perfectly ok for the distributors to deliver a 1-2 year old 
mono version.
(for some reason)

Dumping messages to the command line still is a problem for monodevelop 
- even in 2.6. All mono errors get handled and are shown into a message 
box - but unfortunately segfaults in in the C libraries we use lead to a 
non-handled exception which is printed on the command-line :(

> Mike: yes please, send me that script so that I can install "parallel mono
> on mint".
> May I just say that monodevelop 2.2 on Mint, actually is looking for (good
> old) libgtkembedmoz.so, which is actually not part of Mint out-of-the-box,
> and is not in Firefox distribution either. I get this when I do (in
> terminal) monodevelop -? ... which mercifully is not followed by 100% CPU
> and eternal splash screen.
> Do I understand that this is due to some GTK plugin not required by
> MonoDevelop to run? Or not? Maybe if I remove this dependency I would be
> able to start MonoDevelop 2.2 on Mint "out-of-the-box" ... ?
>
>    
The dependency isn't required. Maybe one of our addins in extras/ uses 
this. I think that the problem you're experiencing is unrelated to this.

Regards
Mike