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Fedora have outdated mone-2 while CKAN needs mono-3.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.

Certificates issue

CKAN may fail to download anything because it uses encrypted connection HTTPS but cannot find some cryptographic 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!

use the following command (not as root) to fix that:

mozroots --import --ask-remove