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 2.4

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

On Itanium, you must obtain libunwind:

http://www.hpl.hp.com/research/linux/libunwind/download.php4

Optional dependencies:

* libgdiplus

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

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, SPARCv9, S/390, AMD64 and PowerPC systems.

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

c. Building the software from SVN
---------------------------------

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

svn co svn+ssh://[email protected]/source/trunk/mono
svn co svn+ssh://[email protected]/source/trunk/mcs

Then, go into the mono directory, and configure:

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

This will automatically go into the mcs/ tree and build the
binaries there.

This assumes that you have a working mono installation, and that
there's a C# compiler named 'mcs', and a corresponding IL
runtime called 'mono'. You can use two make variables
EXTERNAL_MCS and EXTERNAL_RUNTIME to override these. e.g., you
can say

make EXTERNAL_MCS=/foo/bar/mcs EXTERNAL_RUNTIME=/somewhere/else/mono

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 try from the beginning.

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 with:

make get-monolite-latest

This will download and automatically gunzip and untar the
tarball, and place the files appropriately so that you can then
just run:

make

To ensure that you're using the 'monolite' distribution, you can
also try passing EXTERNAL_MCS=false on the make command-line.

Testing and Installation
------------------------

You can run (part of) the mono and mcs testsuites with the command:

make check

All tests should pass.

If you want more extensive tests, including those that test the
class libraries, you need to re-run 'configure' with the
'--enable-nunit-tests' flag, and try

make -k check

Expect to find a few testsuite failures. As a sanity check, you
can compare the failures you got with

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

You can now install mono with:

make install

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

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

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

* runtime engine

mono 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
====================

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 that contains the Makefiles that link the
mono/ and mcs/ build systems.