Installation overview & considerations

This covers the installation of mono on your platform, as well as the installation and configuration of an IDE

Installation overview

Mono is not finished--it is a project still under development. As a result, installation and configuration may not be as smooth as you will be used to from other Linux applications. Nevertheless, mono is in a state that will allow you to get it up and running and gain experience with it--which is, I would suggest, a very smart thing to do.

This document is limited in the following sense: it describes how to download a 'stable' version of mono as a 'tarball' and get it to run on your computer. I'm also assuming you run mono on Linux rather than on Windows. All the examples have been tested on a 'vanilla' Red Hat 7.3 installation.

This document will not cover:



This document is also less useful for two types of people.

This document is aimed at the mono beginner, and aims to present a complete view of a minimal installation, which will allow you to experiment with mono to some degree. It also describes some of those experiments. We expect that after reading this document you'll go on to do either of two things:

  1. Continue to contribute to the mono project in some shape or form. The website has some ideas and suggestions under the heading 'Contributing'.

  2. Continue to write applications that run in mono.

We hope this document will be useful to you in your first steps with mono. Happy hacking!

A note on the development of this document

This document is expected to grow into a full 'running mono howto' over time. As of yet, it does not really discuss some of the excellent efforts of others to package mono into an rpm or deb and prepare it for easy installation. It is our aim to include this in future versions of this document.

Credits

Johannes Roith (johannes@jroith.de), Hinne Hettema, Jaime Anguiano Olarra