mono

This is Mono.

1. Installation
2. Using Mono
3. Directory Roadmap

1. Compilation and Installation
===============================

a. Build Requirements
---------------------

To build Mono, you will need the following components:

* pkg-config

Available from: http://www.freedesktop.org/Software/pkgconfig

* glib 2.0

Available from: http://www.gtk.org/

Optional dependencies:

* ICU library

http://oss.software.ibm.com/icu/index.html

You will need this one to get complete support for the international
features of the .NET Framework.

* Cairo and libgdiplus

If you want to get support for System.Drawing, you will need to get
both Libgdiplus and Cairo.

b. Building the Software
------------------------

If you obtained this package as an officially released tarball,
this is very simple, use configure and make:

./configure --prefix=/usr/local
make
make install

Mono supports a JIT engine on x86, SPARC and PowerPC systems.
The various commands that ship with Mono default to the JIT engine
on x86 and SPARC, to turn it on for PPC systems, use the --with-jit=yes
command line option to configure.

MacOS X Users: you will need to download the latest Boehm GC
Alpha release for garbage collection to work properly.

If you obtained this as a snapshot, you will need an existing
Mono installation. To upgrade your installation, unpack both
mono and mcs:

tar xzf mcs-XXXX.tar.gz
tar xzf mono-XXXX.tar.gz
mv mono-XXX mono
mv mcs-XXX mcs
cd mono
./autogen.sh --prefix=/usr/local
make bootstrap

c. Building the software from CVS
---------------------------------

If you are building the software from CVS, make sure that you
have up-to-date mcs and mono sources:

cvs co mono mcs

Then, go into the mono directory, and configure:

cd mono
./autogen.sh --prefix=/usr/local

Depending on whether you have an existing Mono installation or
not, you can try the following:

i. If you have an existing Mono installation
-----------------------------------------

First verify that you have a working installation:

echo 'class X { static void Main () { System.Console.Write("OK");}}' > x.cs

Compile:

mcs x.cs

And run:

mono x.exe

If you get the output `OK' and no errors, and you have mono
version 0.31 or later, continue. Otherwise, you can try option
(ii) below.

You are ready to start your CVS upgrade. Compile with

make bootstrap

This will automatically go into the mcs/ tree and build the
binaries there, and copy them into the appropriate
sub-directories of mono/runtime/.

Now, go to step (iii) below.

ii. If you don't have a working Mono installation
---------------------------------------------

If you don't have a working Mono installation, an obvious choice
is to install the latest released packages of 'mono' for your
distribution and go back to step (i).

You can also try a slightly more risky approach that should work
almost all the time.

This works by first getting the latest version of the 'monolite'
distribution, which contains just enough to run the 'mcs'
compiler. You do this by

make get-monolite-latest

This should place a monolite-latest.tar.gz in the parent
directory of the 'mono' source tree. You can then run:

make monolite-bootstrap

This will automatically gunzip and untar the tarball, and place
the files appropriately, and then completes the bootstrap.

iii. Testing and Installation
------------------------

You can run the mono and mcs testsuites with the command:

make -k bootstrap-check

Expect to find several testsuite failures, especially in the
mcs/ tree. As a sanity check, you can compare the failures you
got with

http://go-mono.com/tests/displayTestResults.php

You can now install it:

make install

Failure to follow these steps will result in a broken installation.

iv. Other useful "bootstrap"-like facilities
----------------------------------------

If you have a CVS snapshot that you keep updating periodically,
and/or do your development in, you may try using a couple of
specialty make targets that may be slightly faster than a
"make bootstrap".

You can try a two-stage bootstrap with:

make faststrap

This assumes that you have already run a "make bootstrap" on the
tree before.

If you want to avoid waiting even for that, you can try the
riskier one-stage build:

make fasterstrap

This should be attempted only if you're sure that the sources of
the mcs compiler itself and the sources of the the libraries
used by it have not been changed.

2. Using Mono
=============

Once you have installed the software, you can run a few programs:

* runtime engine

mono program.exe
or
mint program.exe

* C# compiler

mcs program.cs

* CIL Disassembler

monodis program.exe

See the man pages for mono(1), mint(1), monodis(1) and mcs(2)
for further details.

3. Directory Roadmap
====================

doc/
Contains the web site contents.

docs/
Technical documents about the Mono runtime.

data/
Configuration files installed as part of the Mono runtime.

mono/
The core of the Mono Runtime.

metadata/
The object system and metadata reader.

jit/
The Just in Time Compiler.

dis/
CIL executable Disassembler

cli/
Common code for the JIT and the interpreter.

io-layer/
The I/O layer and system abstraction for
emulating the .NET IO model.

cil/
Common Intermediate Representation, XML
definition of the CIL bytecodes.

interp/
Interpreter for CLI executables.

arch/
Architecture specific portions.

man/

Manual pages for the various Mono commands and programs.

scripts/

Scripts used to invoke Mono and the corresponding program.

runtime/

A directory holding a pre-compiled version of the Mono
runtime.