+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.
+
+ * libzlib
+
+ This library and the development headers are required for compression
+ file support in the 2.0 profile.
+
+ 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
+
+ For people with non-standard installations of the auto* utils and of
+ pkg-config (common on misconfigured OSX and windows boxes), you could get
+ an error like this:
+
+ ./configure: line 19176: syntax error near unexpected token `PKG_CHECK_MODULES(BASE_DEPENDENCIES,' ...
+
+ This means that you need to set the ACLOCAL_FLAGS environment var
+ when invoking autogen.sh, like this:
+
+ ACLOCAL_FLAGS="-I $acprefix/share/aclocal" ./autogen.sh --prefix=/usr/loca
+
+ where $acprefix is the prefix where aclocal has been installed.
+
+ 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
+
+ Experimental: Use at your own risk, it is known to
+ cause problems with garbage collection and is hard to
+ reproduce those bugs.
+
+ 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-moonlight=yes,no
+
+ Whether you want to generate the Silverlight/Moonlight
+ libraries and toolchain in addition to the default
+ (1.1 and 2.0 APIs).
+
+ This will produce the `smcs' compiler which will reference
+ the Silvelright modified assemblies (mscorlib.dll,
+ System.dll, System.Code.dll and System.Xml.Core.dll) and turn
+ on the LINQ extensions for the compiler.
+
+ This option defaults to `no' and it is considered pre-alpha.
+
+ --with-libgdiplus=installed,sibling,<path>
+
+ 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.
+
+ --disable-shared-memory
+
+ Use this option to disable the use of shared memory in
+ Mono (this is equivalent to setting the MONO_DISABLE_SHM
+ environment variable, although this removes the feature
+ completely).
+
+ Disabling the shared memory support will disable certain
+ features like cross-process named mutexes.
+
+ --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.