Red Hat finally adds Mono to Fedora

The next release of the Fedora Core Linux operating system will include the open-source Mono framework, according to the manager of Red Hat’s desktop group. This move means applications written for dot-Net should run on Fedora Linux desktops.

Writing in his blog last week, Red Hat’s Chris Blizzard revealed that Mono will be part of Fedora Core 5, which is expected shortly. Mono is an open-source implementation of Microsoft’s .Net Framework for hosting applications.

Blizzard said Mono joins all of the other enabling tools included in Fedora, such as PyGTK and Java-Gnome. “We’ve [seen] the longest holdout in shipping Mono. In the end we decided it should be part of our offerings,” he added. However, Red Hat’s director of corporate communications, Leigh Day, said that there are no plans to include Mono in a future version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

“Mono is a technology of interest to [the Fedora Foundation] community and the group has decided to include it in Fedora Core 5,” she commented. “At this time, Red Hat has no plans for the endorsement or productisation of Mono.”

Some observers said this was a pity. One poster to an online discussion said, “Mono is becoming more important due to Windows Vista, which has WinFX – the next .Net Framework – as its core API. [So] in future, all native Windows applications will run on Linux with Mono.”