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 On Solaris, make sure that you used GNU tar to unpack this package, as Solaris tar will not unpack this correctly, and you will get strange errors. On Solaris, make sure that you use the GNU toolchain to build the software. 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, ARM 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://USER@mono-cvs.ximian.com/source/trunk/mono svn co svn+ssh://USER@mono-cvs.ximian.com/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 running autogen.sh; make; make install in the mono module directory. You can also try a slightly more risky approach: this may not work, so start from the released tarball as detailed above. 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. d. Common Configuration Options ------------------------------- The following are the configuration options that someone building Mono might want to use: --with-gc=[boehm, included, sgen, none] Selects the garbage collector engine to use, the default is the "included" value. included: This is the default value, and its the most feature complete, it will allow Mono to use typed allocations and support the debugger. It is essentially a slightly modified Boehm GC boehm: This is used to use a system-install Boehm GC, it is useful to test new features available in Boehm GC, but we do not recommend that people use this, as it disables a few features. sgen: The under-development Generational GC for Mono, do not use this in production. none: Disables the inclusion of a garbage collector. --with-tls=__thread,pthread Controls how Mono should access thread local storage, pthread forces Mono to use the pthread APIs, while __thread uses compiler-optimized access to it. Although __thread is faster, it requires support from the compiler, kernel and libc. Old Linux systems do not support with __thread. This value is typically pre-configured and there is no need to set it, unless you are trying to debug a problem. --with-sigaltstack=yes,no This controls whether Mono will install a special signal handler to handle stack overflows. If set to "yes", it will turn stack overflows into the StackOverflowException. Otherwise when a stack overflow happens, your program will receive a segmentation fault. The configure script will try to detect if your operating system supports this. Some older Linux systems do not support this feature, or you might want to override the auto-detection. --with-static-mono=yes,no This controls whether `mono' should link against a static library (libmono.a) or a shared library (libmono.so). This defaults to yes, and will improve the performance of the `mono' program. This only affects the `mono' binary, the shared library libmono.so will always be produced for developers that want to embed the runtime in their application. --with-xen-opt=yes,no The default value for this is `yes', and it makes Mono generate code which might be slightly slower on average systems, but the resulting executable will run faster under the Xen virtualization system. --with-large-heap=yes,no Enable support for GC heaps larger than 3GB. This value is set to `no' by default. --with-ikvm-native=yes,no Controls whether the IKVM JNI interface library is built or not. This is used if you are planning on using the IKVM Java Virtual machine with Mono. This defaults to `yes'. --with-preview=yes,no Whether you want to build libraries that are still not completed (The 2.0 APIs). It defaults to `yes'. --with-libgdiplus=installed,sibling, This is used to configure where should Mono look for libgdiplus when running the System.Drawing tests. It defaults to `installed', which means that the library is available to Mono through the regular system setup. `sibling' can be used to specify that a libgdiplus that resides as a sibling of this directory (mono) should be used. Or you can specify a path to a libgdiplus. --enable-minimal=LIST Use this feature to specify optional runtime components that you might not want to include. This is only useful for developers embedding Mono that require a subset of Mono functionality. The list is a comma-separated list of components that should be removed, these are: aot: Disables support for the Ahead of Time compilation. profiler: Disables support for the default profiler. decimal: Disables support for System.Decimal. pinvoke: Support for Platform Invocation services, disabling this will drop support for any libraries using DllImport. debug: Drop debugging support. reflection_emit: Drop System.Reflection.Emit support large_code: Disables support for large assemblies. logging: Disables support for debug logging. com: Disables COM support. ssa: Disables compilation for the SSA optimization framework, and the various SSA-based optimizations. generics: Generics support. Disabling this will not allow Mono to run any 2.0 libraries or code that contains generics. --disable-dev-random Mono uses /dev/random to obtain good random data for any source that requires random numbers. If your system does not support this, you might want to disable it. There are a number of runtime options to control this also, see the man page. 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. mini/ 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 (obsolete). 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.