It’s been a little while since I’d taken a look at the progress being made by the MONO group in regards to the GUI development and since someone had asked, I thought I’d see how it was working. The current stable working version of MONO tested is 1.2.3. Testing was done on CentOS. And what did I find?
- All major parts of the core MarcEdit program work under the current implementation of MONO, save a few quirks. This means that with a little documentation and a bootloader to load necessary items to the GAC, you could run MarcEdit on a ‘Nix platform using Mono 1.2.3.
- Ancillary programs like the Script Maker, the Delimited Text Translator, Z39.50 client…some of these work, though none work as designed because I need to pipe the call through Mono which isn’t happening at this time. This is something I need to fix (and its an easy one)
- I need to find a good Unicode font for my Linux build. I tested the MARC8-UTF8 and UTF8-MARC8 conversions and they work like a peach. However, I don’t have a font to read the data in UTF8.
- Obviously, the program isn’t quite as polished on ‘Nix under Mono. This is noticeable mostly in status windows and messaging windows. Also, sometimes window sizes are a little off. This doesn’t affect functionality — just bugs me personally since I know how its suppose to work.
So, what does it look like. Here’s some screen shots.
Extract Selected MARC records
MarcEditor
MarcBreaker (MARC=>MARC21XML)
MarcEditor Field Count
So, where do I go from here? Well, I think its probably time to put out some documentation for those brave souls willing to run this beast on a ‘Nix platform at let me know how it all works. I’m in the process of putting together a tar ball, some instructions and a pre-installer that will handle configuring setup files, GAC installation, etc. for users. How long will this take — probably a few days mostly because I’m going to see if I can’t clean up a few display things and Jeremy has got me chained to my computer working on a few LibraryFind issues so we can post the source for 0.8. However, I really do need to get it ready this week — mostly because I will be the the Innovative Users Group May 14-17 and be co-presenting a session on batch editing vendor data. Since there will be a MarcEdit section with examples — I thought I’d do the samples in ‘Nix just to make it fun (and hopefully it will work). 🙂
–TR