Rubenerd

Having installed Fedora 11 alongside FreeBSD on my ThinkPad X40 and deciding I liked it, I went ahead this evening and installed the current beta release of Fedora 12. So far I'm really impressed, but one thing is worrying.

After the OS was installed and I was presented with the default Gnome desktop, I noticed under the Sound & Video Applications menu I saw a link for the F-Spot image organiser. Its been a while since I've been a part of the Red Hat ecosystem so someone might be able to clarify this, but it seems after having it removed from default installs since Fedora 10, they've started bundling Mono again.

I don't want to debate the merits of Mono nor its patent scariness (pardon the terrible IP pun) here, all I want to say is for people like me this move by the Fedora team is worrying. Will this be a permanent feature?

My spell checker says "Uninstalling" isn’t a word

Fortunately looking at it myself you can remove Mono from the Fedora 12 beta by uninstalling the following packages:

• F-Spot
• mono-data-*
• mono-core-*
• mono-addins-*
• gtk-sharp2-*
• gnome-sharp-*
• mono-web-*
• mono-winforms-*

The last Red Hat based distribution I used was Red Hat Linux 9 back in the day so I'm very rusty, but with dependencies being what they are uninstalling just mono-core-* might be enough to be prompted for the removal of all the others.

Update

I installed Fedora 11 from a USB key made from a Live CD which is why I didn't have Mono. I'm assuming this means previous full releases of Fedora had it then. Still worrying though.