After installing Fedora 10 last month, I finally got the Tomboy note-taking application working. I began using Tomboy in Fedora 8, and have several notes stored in Tomboy notebooks. When Tomboy broke in Fedora 10, I put it on my to-do list to figure out how to get it working. I figured the fix would be as easy as re-installing Tomboy. It wasn’t.

Fedora 10 was released three months ago tomorrow. That’s why I was surprised to find that reinstalling / upgrading to the latest Tomboy from the Fedora repository didn’t fix the bug. Before I fixed the problem, trying to run Tomboy would give me an error like:

** (Tomboy:4816): WARNING **: The following assembly referenced from
/usr/lib/tomboy/Tomboy.exe could not be loaded:
Assembly:   Mono.Addins    (assemblyref_index=8)
Version:    0.3.0.0
Public Key: 0738eb9f132ed756
The assembly was not found in the Global Assembly Cache, a path listed in the
MONO_PATH environment variable, or in the location of the executing assembly
(/usr/lib/tomboy).

Until I saw the error, I didn’t even know Tomboy was a .NET application running under Mono. I searched around for a solution to the problem and found the bug has been reported three times to Red Hat Bugzilla, but still no one has solved it. The solution, fortunately, was pretty simple, and was mentioned by Austin Acton in a bug comment. The solution also was mentioned on this blog post by Mark Ito (I’m assuming that’s his name from the subdomain).

The solution is to install mono-addins from the ‘fedora’ repository.

sudo yum install mono-addins

For such an easy fix, you have to wonder why this 5-month old bug with high severity is still open. Tomboy comes as part of the standard Fedora 10 install. It must not be as easy as making the tomboy package dependent on the mono-addins package.