Mono on Raspberry Pi

Question

I saw a lot of talk about running Mono / .NET code on a raspberry Pi . Was there any success in actually launching any kind of mono code on Raspberry Pi?

On their website, they list several Linux distributions that run on the device, and some of these distributions include Mono. However, no one knows if Mono works on it.

Is there a working implementation?

Answer 1

People on the Raspberri Pi board report that Mono really works , at least for simple applications.

Answer 2

I managed to run my Delta Forth.NET compiler on Debian 6.0 (Squeeze) and Mono. It worked flawlessly with full binary compatibility, the only thing I needed to do was recompile the code to install on .NET 3.5 (instead of 4.0), since Mono on Debian is a bit behind .NET versions.

The compiler is not a trivial .NET application, so I was glad to see how the compiler works on my tiny raspberry Pi.

The actual steps that I took to do the magic were (I recall from memory):

• Install Mono runtime using: sudo apt-get install mono
• Call the compiler itself using: mono DeltaForth.exe file_to_compile.4th

That's all. The hardest part of this effort was to transfer files from my Windows machine to the Raspberry Pi using a flash drive :-)

Answer 3

Mono on Raspberry Pi is possible and fairly easy to set up. The following assumes you are on Debian. This is taken from my blog , which offers several lessons of Raspberry Pi.

Note. The standard Mono runtime currently available only supports up to .NET 3.5, unless you compile it from the source yourself.

So, you want to start developing some applications for your Raspberry Pi, but your programming knowledge is limited to modern .NET languages ​​such as VB.NET and C # . Not a problem!! Welcome to the world of Mono, an open-source, cross-platform and compatible version of the .NET Framework. Using an IDE development such as Visual studio, or even better MonoDevelop , you can create EXE files that will run on your Raspberry Pi. All you have to do is set the Mono runtime on the Raspberry Pi. To do this, we introduce the following lines.

sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install mono-runtime 

As mentioned in other manuals, the first line is used to update the APT-GET package manager to ensure that you use the latest sources to download your packages. The second line sets and prepares the battery life. This is it, now to run the developed Mono EXE file. Just simply attach the command to the word mono , as shown below.

 mono myprogram.exe 

Answer 4

Yes. I successfully run Mono-based Winforms and Webforms (XSP) applications. Detailed instructions are available on my blog.

http://www.amazedsaint.com/2013/04/hack-raspberry-pi-how-to-build.html

Answer 5

Hard float support is now in mono 3.2.7:
http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?t=62496&p=468500

The most recent source can be installed from git. It should be something like this:
(delete the previous monos first)

 sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install git build-essential automake autoconf libtool gettext git clone git://github.com/mono/mono.git cd mono ./autogen.sh --prefix=/usr/local make get-monolite-latest make EXTERNAL_MCS="${PWD}/mcs/class/lib/monolite/gmcs.exe" sudo make install 

Here's what “mono -V" looks like on my raspberries:

 Mono JIT compiler version 3.4.0 (master/ae165c5 Thu Mar 13 01:20:37 UTC 2014) Copyright (C) 2002-2014 Novell, Inc, Xamarin Inc and Contributors. www.mono-project.com TLS: __thread SIGSEGV: normal Notifications: epoll Architecture: armel,vfp+hard Disabled: none Misc: softdebug LLVM: supported, not enabled. GC: sgen 

A quick test seems to work fine:

 csharp> Math.Pow(2,4); 16 

Answer 6

On my raspberry Pi, which runs the Fedora 18 remix, I needed:

  # yum -y install mono-devel 

Verify:

  # csharp Mono C# Shell, type "help;" for help Enter statements below. csharp> Console.WriteLine("Hello, I am PI"); Hello, I am PI csharp> 

Answer 7

I managed to run .NET exe on raspberry pi (debian).

Install mono - http://logicalgenetics.com/raspberry-pi-and-mono-hello-world/

then run exe as mono something.exe

Answer 8

You can run the x86 version of Mono on Raspberry Pi using the ExaGear Desktop app .

It allows you to run almost all x86 applications and even install Wine to run Windows applications.

They say that Firefox is faster than even native ...

Answer 9

I managed to start the WCF service with EntityFramework, in which the MySql database installed on Pi was loaded. It was just a test project, but the performance was good.