[Mono-list] Installing Mono without admin

[Michael Hutchinson]

On Thu, Apr 2, 2009 at 8:54 PM, fevans <fevans at harris.com> wrote:
>
> The following comments are hopelessly generalized, but in a nutshell a lot of
> .NET developers entering into Linux either don't have root, or are reluctant
> to make changes to a system they don't yet fully understand.
>
> I'm not a big fan of java, but by comparison the JRE distributions do seem
> to be fairly self-contained. One can install multiple JREs on a system in
> any directory, and simply add it to $PATH.
>
> Mono in contrast seems to have followed the traditional linux approach of
> '/usr/bin' and '/usr/lib'.  I can't say which approach is 'better', but I've
> spent a lot of weekends groping for work-arounds. The RPMs don't have a
> relocate package, and when I build from source with a --prefix option, I
> still find references that are looking for mono in the system bin directory.
>
> To be clear, I'll bet good money its something I'm doing wrong. But that's
> the whole point. For a developer switching to Linux (which is a big percent
> of Mono adoption), there are some big hurdles. Downloading and compiling
> source is a no-brainer in the linux world, but for a windows developer/user
> it feels a bit unnatural.
>
> Overall Mono rocks. Looking forward to leveraging SIMD. Just taking a little
> longer to get there than I'd hoped.

FWIW, you can build and install isolated Monos as non-root quite
easily: http://www.mono-project.com/Parallel_Mono_Environments

-- 
Michael Hutchinson
http://mjhutchinson.com