Mono on Raspberry Pi

Question

I've seen a lot of talk about running Mono/.NET code on the Raspberry Pi. Has there been any success in actually running any Mono code on a Raspberry Pi?

On their site, they list several Linux distributions that work on the device and some of these distributions include Mono. However, none detail whether Mono works on it.

Is there a working implementation?

Answer 1

Mono on the Raspberry Pi is possible and reasonably easy to set up. The following assumes you're on Debian. This is taken from my blog that offers a number of Raspberry Pi tutorials

A note: the standard Mono runtime currently available only supports up to .NET 3.5 unless you compile from source yourself.

So you want to start developing some applications for your Raspberry Pi but your knowledge of programming is limited to the 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. By using a development IDE such as Visual studio, or even better MonoDevelop you can produce EXE files that will run on your Raspberry Pi. All you need to do is to install the Mono run times on the Raspberry Pi. To do that we enter the following lines.

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install mono-runtime

As mentioned in other tutorials the first line is used to update the APT-GET package manager to ensure it is using the latest sources for downloading your packages. The second line installs and prepares the runtimes for use. That's it, now to run a Mono developed EXE file. Just simply prefix the command with the word mono as shown below.

mono myprogram.exe 

Answer 2

I was able to run my .NET exe on raspberry pi (debian).

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

then run your exe as mono something.exe

Answer 3

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

It allow to run almost all x86 apps and even install Wine to run Windows apps.

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