Update Mono on Ubuntu

This page is intended to give detailed instructions for updating (downloading and compiling) MONO on Ubuntu. Most of the information has been provided by DEVARTHUR in his blob site.

These directions have been generalised where appropriate in an attempt to make them future proof. Where you see the release you need to substitute the release level you wish to install e.g. "2.4.2.3".

Firstly you need to make sure you have all the prerequisites which are:
- autoconf
- build-essential
- binfmt-support
- bison
- gawk
- gettext
- libglib2.0-dev
- mono-common
- pkg-config
- swig

You can use your favourite package manager (aptitude, apt-get, Synaptic, etc.) to do this e.g.:

apt-get install autoconf build-essential binfmt-support bison gawk gettext libglib2.0-dev pkg-config swig

Next you need to download the appropriate version of Mono sources. These are held by Novell in .tar.bz2 format. To see all available releases just type the following into an Internet Browser:

http://ftp.novell.com/pub/mono/sources/mono

To download the source code first change directory to the receiving structure e.g.:
cd software/mono

Now get and unpack the sources:
wget http://ftp.novell.com/pub/mono/sources/mono/mono-release.tar.bz2
tar xf mono-release.tar.bz2

Where release is the desired version, so to get version 2.4.2.3 this would read:
wget http://ftp.novell.com/pub/mono/sources/mono/mono-2.4.2.3.tar.bz2
tar xf mono-2.4.2.3.tar.bz2

This creates a new directory mono-release under the current directory and this is where the compile is run from so change to this directory: cd mono-release

Now configure, compile and install the new version. For this you will need Root privileges, so either change to Root user or use the sudo option:
sudo ./configure --with-libgdiplus=no
sudo make
sudo make install

Both "make" statements take some time and produce lots of chatter to the screen, don't worry about it. Any errors are likely to be due to missing prerequisites but it kindly tells you which ones at the end of the step.

Lastly you need a symlink to let binfmt-support execute mono executeables directly from the shell:
ln -s /usr/local/bin/mono /usr/bin/cli

If you get a report that the file already exists that is OK, it just means that a previous release of mono was installed.

To verify that the new version of mono is now live issue the command:
mono -V

This will tell you the current live version.