I'm not familiar with Mono or any of the .Net on Linux efforts, so forgive my ignorance. However, having a running .Net stack with a CLR VM and class libs is no

I'm not familiar with Mono or any of the .Net on Linux efforts, so forgive my ignorance. However, having a running .Net stack with a CLR VM and class libs is not the whole story when it comes to running Windows native server side stuff. One of the things I've discovered building spreadserve.com is that there's a lot of COM & Registry plumbing necessary to enable Windows native desktop binaries to run in a server environment. So I imagine running real .Net based servers on Linux would require something like Wine to supply ABI compatible interfaces to the registry and COM services, and lots else beside. That's a non trivial undertaking. The MS Linux described in the Register story sounds like it's dedicated to networking tasks. I'd bet there's no .Net running on it at all.