This announcement is probably a bit premature, but we have SplendidCRM running on Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 (SLES).  We’ve been working on this for a couple of weeks, ever since the great folks on the Mono team created a VMware image of SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop (SLED) with a stable version of Mono and MonoDevelop.

Our first instinct was to copy the entire SplendidCRM project to SLED and recompile under MonoDevelop.  This worked very well, with MonoDevelop being able to convert a Visual Studio 2003 project into its own format.  Mono and MonoDevelop are incredible products and we were thrilled to see SplendidCRM running on a Linux platform.

There were a couple of things that we needed to fix in SplendidCRM, such as correcting the case on any images or files.  SplendidCRM is pretty tight, so there were only a couple of images that needed to be corrected.  We also needed to alter the way we initialize the culture settings as values like the CurrencyDecimalSeparator are not directly updatable on Mono.

Now we turn to the most impressive feature of Mono.  Mono supports copy deployment using Windows binaries.  Put simply, this means that we can copy our Visual Studio 2003 DLLs over to Linux and it will run.  That is impressive!

For a preview, check out SplendidCRM on Linux/Mono connected to our SQL Server Express demo database:

            http://mssqlmono.splendidcrm.com/

We also have SplendidCRM on Linux/Mono connected to our MySQL demo database:

            http://mysqlmono.splendidcrm.com/

If, by chance, the above sites are not working, it is probably because we are working to get SplendidCRM connected to Oracle and/or DB2.  Our ultimate goal is to have our SLES server running SplendidCRM plus local instances of MySQL, Oracle 10g Express and DB2 Express-C.