Nathan Bridgewater

I’ve had a few requests to write a full walk-through installing Mono 2.8 w/ Asp.Net 4.0 since I posted an install script for Mono 2.8 on Ubuntu and Fedora.  So here it is! We’re going to be setting up a new server from scratch then installing just the basics of Mono 2.8 (Mono, GTK, GDI, XSP, & Mod_Mono). Then we’ll use that to setup a new Apache server with a basic Asp.Net 4.0 MVC2 application w/ MySql Membership.  That sounds like a lot, but it’s really very straight forward. So lets get started!

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I updated both my scripts for Ubuntu and Fedora to download and install the latest 2.8 Mono release.  I’ve also been playing with GTK lately (specifically Pixbufs) and so this script now includes the install for GTK-Sharp. Anyway, you can find the updated scripts on my GitHub snippets project.  Both Fedora and Ubuntu install scripts should succesfully install mod_mono, Xsp, mono core, GTK, and GDIplus at a minimum.

If you have problems running your apps that use the gdi-plus, it could be resolved with a refresh of the DllMap.  Enter "sudo ldconfig"  and then try to re-run your app. Checkout http://www.mono-project.com/DllNotFoundException for more details.

2/20/2011 Update

Mono 2.10 has been released. I added a new install script here. 

1/27/2011 update

Mono 2.8.2 was released awhile back, which included some security fixes and enhancements. I have since posted an updated script along another blog post related to it here. 

10/26/2010 update

The script now installs to /opt/mono-2.8 instead of /usr/local in favor of the parallel mono environment suggestion. You may need to add /opt/mono-2.8/bin to your system PATH.

For Ubuntu, this is located in /etc/environment; insert /opt/mono-2.8/bin to the beginning of the path. Keep in mind, this will change the global PATH, so if your'e using a workstation, this may affect other applications that depend on Mono. Consider changing your profile PATH. (See comments for more details). 

For RH/Fedora, I updated the install script to also create an environment script at: /etc/profile.d to include this mono install to your system path.

Disclaimer: You should only try this script if your'e familiar with the process of compiling packages manually. I'm trying to make it work for MonoDevelop and other files, but it may not work with them in its current state.

Feel free to fork and make changes of your own to the script from GitHub. I'll gladly welcome pull requests containing improvements.

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Wow, I haven't seen much written about it other than the updated pages on the mono-project.com website and some tweets from Miguel de lcaza, but finally Mono 2.8 released! This release has some major updates include full C# 4.0 spec, MVC2 (official), and Asp.Net 4.0 mod_mono among a ton of other fixes and enhancements.  I'll be writing another blog post today with an updated script to compile/install the 2.8 build on Debian & RedHat distros. 

A while back I added a Fedora 13 install script for Mono that downloads, builds, and installs the last tested daily build along with xsp and mod_mono.

I just recently updated it to use the Sept 1st, 2010 daily build. You can pull the latest script directly from my website or from my repository on github.

Script Usage

My test environment was a standard web server install from the Fedora 13 download DVD.  After the install, I started the same process I performed with the Ubuntu install, which was something like this:

mkdir mono
cd mono
wget http://www.integratedwebsystems.com/resources/p796/fedora_mono-trunk.sh
chmod 744 fed*.sh
./fedora_mono-trunk.sh

That’s it. It’ll first install all the required dependencies for the build and the web server. It’ll then download the 9/1 build (or latest tested version) from the daily tarball list and pull mod_mono and xsp from subversion trunk. Finally, it will extract, compile, and install everything.

The only thing remaining is to setup a web application and configure apache to use mod_mono. For this, I like to use the Mod Mono Config Tool as a starting point to build my virtual host configuration file.

Setup your web server:

1. Move the mod_mono.conf from /etc/httpd/conf to /etc/httpd/conf.d
2. Create a new directory to hold your virtual host config files at: /etc/httpd/sites-enabled
   
   mkdir /etc/httpd/sites-enabled
3. Copy your new virtual host config file to /etc/httpd/sites-enabled
4. Append a virtual host config line to your httpd.conf
   
   echo ”Include sites-enabled/*.*” >> /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf
5. Disable Selinux by editing the /etc/selinux/config file and changing SELINUX=disabled
6. Reboot server
7. Start web server if it isn’t configured to auto-start. (use chkconfig to set auto-start)
   
   service httpd start

That should do it. You can test your new virtual host by browsing to it. The 404 response should show the new mod-mono version.

Good luck!

So lately, I’ve been pretty wrapped up with kids and family so I haven’t had much time to post anything new.  However, I did start a new project, which I’ll detail out more as I go. It’s been quite the experience so far since I decided to build this one from the ground up using MySql and Linux/Mono.  I’ve never designed apps like that before. For one, I’ve had to learn a new set of design tools for MySql as opposed to my comfortable Sql Management Studio. And I’ve also had to very incrementally test different programming technologies and methods that were questionably supported in Linux/Mono.  The beauty of this is that no matter what I do to make it work for Mono, the app will always work on Windows, and there’s little development time lost if I have to fall back to its native platform.

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Updated June 23, 2010!

Lately, I’ve been really digging the new Ubuntu 10.04 on my desktop and web server. So I’ve been meaning to get a post out here describing how I got Mono trunk installed since it comes packaged with 2.4.4.  After much testing, I finally have finished getting a script to work with a fresh, vanilla install.

I stumbled on this blog post by Boris Schieman where he wrote a bash script to compile and install the Mono trunk.  I made a few tweaks to it for a vanilla linux install for the tagged 2.6.4 release and setup another one for updating a mono trunk build using the daily tarballs. I’ve successfully tested both versions on Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid. I’m just a casual linux/mono user, so use this at your own risk.

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So for the third and final part of this series, I want to walk through how I ported a very small project I posted on CodePlex awhile back called SiteManager. It is an extremely simplified CMS application that I wrote using Linq to Sql and MVC in order to provide a very basic and easy website tool. It uses membership provider for authentication and Linq to Sql Classes with its database in MS Sql Server. For this walkthrough, I’ll be converting the database to MySql and adapting Linq to Sql to Dblinq so it can completely run on Mono and Linux.

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As the second part of this series, I’ll look at building a website that can use the MySql Membership Provider. This is one of the main hang-ups I’ve run into while porting one of my ASP.NET applications to Mono. With the latest MySql Connector, this turns out to be a very easy thing to do. It’s nearly as simple as setting up your web.config with the correct parameters and getting the right connector version.

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I’ve always kept an eye on the Mono project, mostly out of curiosity and intrigue. The last time I played around with Mono it was at version 2.0, and at the time I didn’t really spend a lot of time on it because it didn’t support some of the things I was using.  Well recently, I regained interest in Mono when I saw it now supports MVC and some of Dblinq. And since I’ve been buzzing on the whole MVC thing for awhile, I decided to check Mono out for myself and start a fun little porting project. So this is the first part of a three part series describing everything I did to get a server up and running and one of my Asp.Net MVC applications ported to Mono.

This first part will cover installing and configuring an OpenSuse 11.2 server with Apache/Mono and SSH. The second part will talk about how to setup a MySql Membership provider (with mono and Windows), and the third part is a walkthrough showing how to port a simple Asp.Net MVC site to mono and MySql. I’m also targeting those of you who use virtual hosting where you might only have SSH (after install) to configure your server, so I will be using text based tools: SSH, vi, and yast for all my installations and configuration after getting the base system installed.

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