Using Mono 2.0.1 on Ubuntu - 0

Although Mono 2.0.1 has been out for some time now it will take another major upgrade for Ubuntu to actually include it. Currently Ubuntu includes Mono 1.2.6.

If you would like to work with the newer Mono version you need to compile it yourself for now. Thankfully this is easier than it sounds. The following will upgrade your Ubuntu installation but note: this does not cover MonoDevelop, which will stay at the old version.

To prepare for the compilation you need to install the following packages:

sudo apt-get install build-essential swig autoconf bison gawk mono-common binfmt-support libgtk2.0-dev

Once you are done, download and unpack the source for Mono. This will get you 2.0.1:

wget http://ftp.novell.com/pub/mono/sources/mono/mono-2.0.1.tar.bz2
tar xf mono-2.0.1.tar.bz2

Now compile and install mono as below. If anything major is missing on your system configure will give a warning. The make phase will take a bit of time.

cd mono-2.0.1
./configure –with-libgdiplus=no
make
make install

To make sure that your Mono build executables can be run directly from the command line you need to add one more symbolic link:

ln -s /usr/local/bin/mono /etc/alternatives/cli

Tags: 2.01, Learn C#, mono