System setup

Below are the details of my system setup and the software I needed to install before I got going:

System: XPS 720 H2C Quad Core Extreme overclocked to 3.6MHz, 4Gb Ram
OS: Windows 7 64-bit

Software: Visual Studio 2008 Professional, Virtual PC, IronPython 2.6, Python 2.6, Mono 2.6.1.

I setup two virtual computers for Virtual PC:

1. Vista 32-bit - I all too often run into troubles using 64bit windows so decided to use a 32-bit version of Vista. All my Windows development will be done on this virtual machine.

2. Ubuntu 9.10 - I actually installed Ubuntu 9.09 from an image I found on torrentz.com, once installed it automatically upgraded to 9.10. I'd tried setting up a Linux system a couple of times in the past - not a fun experience, as even the various partitions needed by Linux had to be created manually... Life was very different with my Ubuntu install - stuck the disk in and it automatically installed with no trouble whatsoever.

The plan is to take any of the IronPython code I develop on the Vista VPC, and run it under Mono on the Ubuntu VPC.

So on the Ubuntu VPC I used the Synaptic Package Manager (System -> Administration) to upgrade to the latest version of Mono.. surprisingly easy task. Only IronPython 1.1 was available through the Synaptic Package Manager so I went to the IronPython site to download the latest version which was 2.6 at the time of writing.

I downloaded the IronPython-2.6-Bin.zip to /home/bertie/Downloads and then unzipped it with (by first opening a terminal window and CDing to the appropriate directory):

unzip IronPython-2.6-Bin.zip

To check that things were setup correctly I CDed to the IronPython (IPY) directory:

cd IronPython-2.6

and attempted to run ipy.exe under mono:

mono ipy.exe

What I got back was:

IronPython 2.6 (2.6.10920.0) on .NET 2.0.50727.1433
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.

following by a warning about not being able to load Microsoft.Dynamic.dll. Even with the warning this is pretty cool... a complex Windows application running on Linux with the help of Mono. I'll figure out the warning another day.

Some tests I need to run before really getting stuck in are:

1. Perform a WinForms test to make sure my planned GUI will display OK in Ubuntu;
2. Make sure I can access the Serial Port in Ubuntu using the System.IO.Ports namespace in .NET;
3. Make sure I can send some data to Amazon's Simple DB;
4. Demonstrate a simple multi-threading/processing example;
5. Host a simple ASP.NET page on my soon-to-be-delivered PlugPC;
6. Setup a mySQL server for local data storage.

If I can get all these to work then I'll be in pretty good shape to move forward.