Installing CKAN on Fedora

Fedora provides an outdated version of Mono (2.x.x) while CKAN requires Mono >= 3.x.x. If you try to run CKAN with the old mono you will get an error similar to the one below:

System.Windows.Forms.SplitContainer doesn't implement interface System.ComponentModel.ISupportInitialize

Installing Mono 3 on Fedora

The official update is still pending but you can install the experimental one. From a terminal, login as root using su -l and setup the COPR repository:

cd /etc/yum.repos.d
R=$(rpm -qf /etc/os-release --qf "%{version}")
wget http://copr.fedoraproject.org/coprs/elsupergomez/mono/repo/fedora-$R/elsupergomez-mono-fedora-$R.repo

Now Mono 3.x.x is available to install. One important Mono file sneaked into libgdiplus-devel, so you need it as well.

yum shell
<inside yum shell>
install mono-core libgdiplus-devel
update mono-* libgdiplus-devel
run
<press `y` to proceed>
exit

Log out from root shell typing another exit. We're done.

Running CKAN

Try to double-click ckan.exe. If the OS asks you for a program to open it with - type mono. The other option is to use the shell to start CKAN with:

mono ckan.exe

Non-English locale issue

If your system is in non-English locale (for example Cyrillic) then CKAN instead of updating database will fail with error

Unhandled Exception:
System.NotSupportedException: CodePage 866 not supported

To remedy that run CKAN with a forced neutral locale (which is a good old Kerbal tradition).

LANG=C mono ckan.exe

Since CKAN is not localized this workaround has no downsides.

Certificates issue

CKAN may fail to download anything because it uses SSL connections but cannot find some cryptography doohickeys. The error message is

Unhandled Exception:
System.Net.WebException: Error: SendFailure (Error writing headers) ---> System.Net.WebException: Error writing headers ---> System.IO.IOException: The authentication or decryption has failed.
<snip>

or

Oh no! Our download failed with a certificate error!

Run the following command (as the same user you run CKAN with) to fix that:

mozroots --import --ask-remove