Managed to fight the jet lag enough to get to the Mono Meeting which was coincidently held at my Hotel.  I've been a long time fan of Miguel de Icaza's dedicated efforts to get C# onto other platforms and it was great to see him in action even though he was unable to get his laptop to talk to the projector ;-)  On the machine that would work, we saw the new Linux windowing system (didn't catch its name) under Suse that uses OpenGL to render the desktop rather than the aging X.. this looked pretty cool I have to say.  We also glimpsed some Mono apps and heard something of the history of Mono.  Basically, pre-Novel the Ximian guys had a pretty bad development experience doing Evolution on Linux which coincided with the ECMA standardization of c#..  so they decided to implement the spec on Linux.  This then grew into a bigger effort which culminated in pretty broad platform support (and the acquisition of Ximian by Novel).  You can now take and ASP.NET website and deploy it on Linux or Mac as well as build cross platform GUI apps using GTK#.  I picked up a Live CD with the demos and dev environment precanned.  Good work guys.. though next time sus out the room and attendant AV before the meeting maybe?!