Pale Musings

Apparently the good folks over at the mono project decided to discontinue binary packages for the Red Hat line of linux distributions.  It’s a shame in a way, there are a lot of those installation out there, so it would be nice to keep things updated through yum or apt-install or rhupdate, etc..

On the up side, installing from source has never been easier.  In the past I have went through many hours of trying to get the right versions of different libraries that were needed.  With the official release of 2.0 it seems much better.  I thought I would share the steps that I went through.

Disclaimer: This worked on a fairly fresh install of CentOS 4.7.  I have not tried it on 5.x, nor on any other flavor of linux (SUSE, Ubuntu, etc..) so your mileage may vary.

At the time of the install (and this writing) the current mono stable version is 2.0.1 so all references will be to that version.  Here are the steps that I went through.

Preparation

Always be prepared – Boy Scouts motto…

In rooting around the web I did find a few helpful pointers.  First, make sure you have gcc installed.  Now this is one of those duh pieces of information, but in the fairness of completeness I thought I would mention it. (Note: If you do not have gcc or bison, install them! Credit The_Assimilator’s comment)

# yum install gcc-c++
# yum install bison

yum install httpd-devel

You may also require the glib-2.0 libraries (thanks to Michael Walsh for that bit).  If you receive the error “Package glib-2.0 was not found in the pkg-config search path” you can install it via yum as well.

yum install glib2-devel

The Main Dance

Next comes the meat of the installation.  First, I downloaded the necessary source packages.  I simply used wget to snag the core mono package, xsp (mono web server) and mod_mono (apache integration).

wget http://ftp.novell.com/pub/mono/sources/mono/mono-2.0.1.tar.bz2
wget http://ftp.novell.com/pub/mono/sources/xsp/xsp-2.0.tar.bz2
wget http://ftp.novell.com/pub/mono/sources/mod_mono/mod_mono-2.0.tar.bz2

Next we install the mono core

tar -vxjf mono-2.0.1.tar.bz2
cd mono-2.0.1
./configure
make
make install
cd ..

Next comes xsp

tar -vxjf xsp-2.0.tar.bz
cd xsp-2.0
./configure
make
make install
cd ..

At this point I recevied an error (I believe it was in the make process) that the compiler could not find the file dotnet.pc.  I found that it was indeed on my system so I simply had to export the path and then finsih the compile.

export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig
make
make install
cd..

Note: Make sure the file dotnet.pc is in that location.  If not, adjust the path above.

Finally we install mod_mono

tar -vxjf mod_mono-2.0.tar.bz2
cd mod_mono-2.0
./configure
make
make install

There, easy huh?

Configuration

You may want to verify a few thigns to make sure the configuration is ready to rock.  In my case, I am keeping the mono configuration in a separate file for sanity sake.  You can do that or put it all in your httpd.conf, it’s up to you.

<IfModule !mod_mono.c>
    LoadModule mono_module /usr/lib/httpd/modules/mod_mono.so
    AddType application/x-asp-net .aspx
    AddType application/x-asp-net .asmx
    AddType application/x-asp-net .ashx
    AddType application/x-asp-net .asax
    AddType application/x-asp-net .ascx
    AddType application/x-asp-net .soap
    AddType application/x-asp-net .rem
    AddType application/x-asp-net .axd
    AddType application/x-asp-net .cs
    AddType application/x-asp-net .config
    AddType application/x-asp-net .Config
    AddType application/x-asp-net .dll
    DirectoryIndex index.aspx
    DirectoryIndex Default.aspx
    DirectoryIndex default.aspx
</IfModule>