Installing Mono 3.x in Ubuntu/Debian

Question

I\'ve recently read that Mono 3.0 has been released with a C# 5 compiler and support for MVC 4 here:

http://www.mono-project.com/Release_Notes_Mono_3.0

and<

Answer 1

Mono 3.x is too bleeding edge for Ubuntu 12.10. Grab preview packages from directhex's PPA this way (this will install 3.2.1):

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:directhex/monoxide

(If you use Ubuntu saucy 13.10, after adding the repository you need to edit the file /etc/apt/sources.list.d/directhex-monoxide-saucy.list and replace the word saucy with raring)

Then, after that:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

This will also get you MonoDevelop 4.x if you had monodevelop installed before.

NOTE: directhex is not some random guy that created a PPA, he's part of the Debian/Ubuntu maintainer team of all the Mono and Mono-based packages. So using this is the most official way to upgrade your infrastructure.

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And for the debian users out there: mono 3.0.6 and MonoDevelop 4.0.x is already available in debian testing. So what I recommend to get this is:

1. Install debian testing (currently named debian jessie).
2. Uninstall mono by doing sudo apt-get purge mono-runtime (after doing this, resist the temptation to do an sudo apt-get autoremove or you will break your system, something which I reported as a bug here).
3. Modify /etc/apt/sources.list, locate the first line that mentions the main source, and rename the word jessie to sid.
4. Do sudo apt-get update.
5. Install monodevelop via sudo apt-get install monodevelop, which will pull mono as a dependency too.
6. Revert what you did in step 3.
7. Do step 4 again.

This way you have a more or less modern distro (as opposed to debian stable), plus very very modern mono packages (the bleeding edge versions for Mono are normally pretty stable).

F# users: Mono 3.0.6 has a bug that prevents this language to work in this version, please use Mono 3.2.x instead.