Steven Reimer

I have begun to work on .NET/C# projects at work and am attempting to retain my Linux desktop. My development IDE is Mono Develop which works great (except with sharepoint.dll). The next step was integrating with Visual Source Safe 2005 which is what we use for our .NET project repository. Maybe one day we can switch to SVN. Until then I can use Wine.

These are the steps I took to get Visual Source Safe 2005 running in Wine 1.1.9:

1. Get the lastest wine (1.1.9)
2. Change wine to run in windows2000 mode
   $ winecfg
   This was recommended on several forums, I didn't try in XP mode.
3. Install .NET 1.1 in Wine. Download from Microsoft and install
4. Install .NET 2.0 in Wine.Download from Microsoft and install. For some reason, when I installed .NET 2.0 it seemed to hang on "initializing installation" but it appeared as an installed requirement in the VSS2005 install.
5. Install missing MFC42.dll. I got it from www.dlldump.com. Without this, Visual Source Safe thinks a trial version is already installed.
6. Install Visual Source Safe 2005

[Optional steps to mount a samba share for network databases.]

1. Mount your Source Safe Database directory. My mount command looked like this:
   $ sudo mount -t cifs -o credentials=/home/steven/.smbmount-cred //services/p-drive /mnt/services/
2. Create symbolic link from within the wine file system to your omount point. Or you could mount directly to the wine drive folder.
   $ ln -s /mnt/service/ /home/steven/.wine/drive-c/services
3. Run Visual Studio and add your source database.

And that's it! At least it was for me. As I am sure you are aware, installations usually vary from one Linux install to the next.

Good Luck!

I upgraded my laptop to Ubuntu 8.10. I have high hopes for this version as it has benchmarked well and with the improvements to CPU usage. My biggest problem with 8.04 was how often my fan turned on (it wouldn't be such a big deal if it wasn't so loud) and how my hard-drive would spin constantly. So far the fan has turned on as much or less than it does with XP and the hard-drive spin issue seem so to be resolved as well.

I have one beef so far: VPN support in the network manager is broken out-of-the-box. It took most of today to get it figured out. Settings wouldn't stick when editing my VPN connection, saving my password resulted in a random error and a needed refuse-EAP setting was unavailable. This was all eventually resolved with much searching and reading. It is frustrating to have something that worked so well in a previous version completely changed and broken in the next.

That said, I am happy to have a Linux installation on my laptop that's not so CPU intensive. As I write this entry, top shows CPU usage under 10% whereas in 8.04 it was usually up around 15%.

More thoughts on Intrepid Ibex to come later.

Those of you who know me may know that I am slightly opposed to Microsoft products. This stems mostly from my anti-institutionalism and fondness for the open source community. Really, it all started with price. So you could say that my Mennonite heritage is what has produced my technological stance.

With that said, for the next several weeks, probably months, I will be donning a Microsoft hat for a project I have been assigned at work. I will be setting up a Sharepoint Intranet for one of our clients. This is as Microsoft as you can get. I will be working with all things Microsoft: MS Office, MS Projects, Active Directory etc.

I am approaching this with an open mind. I am actually interested in seeing how this turns out and learning a bit more about the world of Microsoft. It's definitely something that would look good on the resume. As I have said to a few people: "If it comes to the worst, at least I'll have a reason to not like Microsoft."

Pies are great! Today we had meat and pumpkin pie with Dan and Christina. To steal Dan's phrase: "I like pie!"