This three-day weekend, I have spent some time trying to get a suite of mono packages working on debian/testing. This task isn't quite impossible but is by no means easy at present. Luckily there have been a few news announcements that have made life easier.

The first was that mono 1.1.x packages have hit debian unstable. By using these, it is now trivial to install tomboy (the first of the mono apps I wanted to try out). Unfortunately they are still making their way around the mirrors. Yesterday I got impatient and just changed my apt settings to the primary FTP archive ftp.debian.org, rather than use a more local mirror (my ISP mirrors the debian archive but appears to be third-generation). Today, I've done the same at work. Normally I use an oxford university mirror, but it hasn't picked up the mono packages yet (although by now, ftp.uk.debian.org has).

Having obtained debian mono packages, I proceeded to try and get beagle working. Whilst doing this I have been revising the beagle documentation for debian. I had to rebuild my kernel twice: the first to patch in inotify support, the second to enable extended attributes for the ext3 filesystem. I stopped last night trying to rebuild D-BUS with mono bindings. This morning I learn that with the release of beagle 0.0.10, D-BUS is no longer necessary, so when I get home I expect to have beagle up and running in no time :-)