I have an installation of Ubuntu 6.06 and installed Monodevelop without error. The problem is...

Working in the graphic designer, when I drag a widget (button) on to the application window it fills the entire window. attempts to change it's size either graphically (mouse drag) or by numeric input do nothing. What's strange is that the project will compile and run in debug, but there is no evidence of the widget being instatiated in the source files.

I can see why this behavious would be weird if you've never used Swing or GTK before! I take it your used to Visual Studio style designing? This is the intended behaviour. Everything is based around containers. Different containers do different things. The default for a Window will hold one widget. It expands it to the size of the window. You can add things like vbox'es. These let you add an arbitrary number of widgets, and it will organize them verticall on the screen. You can also add hboxes, which do the same thing but horizontally, and mixtures of the two. There are others, but I usually end up using these for most things.

And if you are in fact coming from Visual Studio, you'll find this method of "containers" a huge time saver. I used to spend a lot of time writing custom resizing code to get my Windows applications to resize the way I wanted. Once I learned the quirks of using GTK+ containers-- it's no longer a chore at all.

Thanks for the advice. I knew it had to be someting basic. Yes I am coming over from the dark side. I am looking forward to getting free though.

Well, it will be a week or two before my next reply on this because I'm givig the box with that stuff on it to my dad for Christmas! No worries though, because I am also bulding myself a new one that is "poquito mas macho" (Intel DG965SS MB with Pentium D 820)! So when I get Linux and Mono runnning again there will doubtless be more questions.

Meanwhile Happy Holidays to all, and once again thanks!