The Open Sourcerer

How to remove Mono from Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope [Updated]

It’s that time again

Fortunately, Mono is still quite trivial to remove and has not, apparently, increased its infiltration of the Ubuntu/Gnome code base as one might have been led to believe if you’d read this on the 1st April:

“Mark Shuttleworth, the Benevolent Dictator for Life of the popular Ubuntu Linux distro, has announced his plans to rewrite all of Gnome, X11 and the Linux kernel using the Mono platform…

Ubuntu is Linux for human beings, and, believe it or not, Microsoft employees are human beings too. We think we need to work closer with Microsoft to ensure heterogenous data silo paradigm middleware enhancements can continue to grow. Oh, and they gave me this nice T-shirt.”

As was the case with 8.10 Intrepid Ibex, there are just two applications in the default Jaunty desktop install which depend on Mono: F-Spot and Tomboy.

As an alternative to F-Spot, I happily use the Gnome viewer gThumb for managing the import and deletion of images from our digital cameras. I actually think it is better for a simple reason. It allows me to copy the images off my camera and delete them from the camera at the same time. The last time I tried F-Spot (admittedly quite a while ago now) I could never find a setting to do this.

And for note taking I have been happily using notecase. Although I note [pun intended] that the developer has stopped work on the free version himself the code is available under a BSD license so if anyone wants to pick it up and run with it they can. Anyway – notecase works fine for me and is still in the repos.

There are many other note taking type applications too. Here is what looks to be quite a comprehensive (albeit old) list of them: http://linuxappfinder.com/utilities/notes

But this is just GREAT!

Whilst I was preparing this article, I came across this on April 1st too. I actually did think it was a joke.

However it seems not; a bored and unemployed (ex Novell/Suse) developer, Hubert Figuière, is porting [has ported] Tomboy to C++ and calls it Gnote.

You can now use a virtually identical application to Tomboy without Mono! (This is still an early development so YMMV).

There is a PPA for Ubuntu here very kindly organised by Vadim Peretokin. I installed it on my intrepid desktop just to see it and it looks exactly the same as Tomboy!

Even better, as it isn’t built on top of Mono, it has fairly meagre requirements too:

sudo apt-get install gnote
[sudo] password for alord:
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
The following NEW packages will be installed
gnote libboost-filesystem1.34.1 libboost-regex1.34.1 libxml++2.6-2
0 upgraded, 4 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
1 not fully installed or removed.
Need to get 1130kB of archives.
After this operation, 3400kB of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue [Y/n]? Y

3.4MB vs. 54.0MB. That’s a decent comparison I think.

OK. The moment you’ve all been waiting for…

To remove that patent-trap-masquerading-as-free-software from your Shiny New Ubuntu Jaunty system simply type:

sudo apt-get purge libmono0 mono-common libgdiplus

[UPDATE]
Thanks to a keen eyed commenter, Lupine, we note that there is another package that lurks hidden and must be explicitly removed. I have added libgdiplus to this command since first publishing. To remove it individually just enter sudo apt-get purge libgdiplus. Thanks Lupine.
[/UPDATE]

Then watch what happens next…

The following packages will be REMOVED
f-spot* libart2.24-cil* libflickrnet2.1.5-cil* libgconf2.24-cil* libglade2.0-cil* libglib2.0-cil* libgmime2.2a-cil* libgnome-keyring1.0-cil* libgnome-vfs2.24-cil* libgnome2.24-cil* libgnomepanel2.24-cil* libgtk2.0-cil* libmono-addins-gui0.2-cil* libmono-addins0.2-cil* libmono-cairo2.0-cil* libmono-corlib2.0-cil* libmono-data-tds2.0-cil* libmono-data2.0-cil* libmono-getoptions2.0-cil* libmono-i18n2.0-cil* libmono-posix2.0-cil* libmono-security2.0-cil* libmono-sharpzip2.84-cil* libmono-sqlite2.0-cil* libmono-system-data2.0-cil* libmono-system-web2.0-cil* libmono-system2.0-cil* libmono0* libmono2.0-cil* libndesk-dbus-glib1.0-cil* libndesk-dbus1.0-cil* mono-2.0-gac* mono-2.0-runtime* mono-common* mono-gac* mono-jit* mono-runtime* tomboy*
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 38 to remove.
After this operation, 54.0MB disk space will be freed.
Do you want to continue [Y/n]?

Oh yes please…

To wrap up this post, we’ve been using Jaunty on various devices for some time now. It’s been really stable, boots very fast and is probably the best desktop operating system you can get anywhere and for any price right now. Thanks to Canonical and the rest of the amazing FOSS Community for making Ubuntu and this release happen.

Our Libertus Server Appliances, with the Mono-free Jaunty 9.04 server edition, are available from today.

Tell Someone Else!