Installing CKAN on Fedora

Fedora have outdated mone-2 while CKAN needs mono-3. If you try to use it with mono-2 it will fail with a huge error message starting with

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

Installing mono 3 on Fedora

The official update is still pending [1] but you can install the experimental one [2]. Open console and login as root using su -l. Then setup 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 is now 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.

[1] http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/Mono_3.4

[2] http://copr.fedoraproject.org/coprs/elsupergomez/mono/

Running CKAN

Try to doubleclick ckan.exe. If OS is asking for program to open it with then type mono. Or you can use shell:

mono ckan.exe

Non-english locale issue

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

Unhandled Exception:
System.NotSupportedException: CodePage 866 not supported

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

LANG=C mono ckan.exe

Since ckan is not localized such trick has no downsides.