Fun and games with Mono
Mono is the Linux port of .NET, Microsoft’s all-encompassing programming framework.
Mono also has an Apache module which allows ASP and C# code to be run in Linux.
At the moment, my VPS runs Ubuntu, so I set out to find a way of installing Mono. Unfortunately, Mono doesn’t have an automatic distribution repository for Ubuntu installers (Debian-style). Therefore, I needed to download and compile the sources.
Mono, however, is a massive piece of software and it took more than half-an-hour to compile and install, which is more than I’ve had to wait for anything like it before. Fortunately, XSP and mod_mono took much less time.
Something which helped me a lot was a quick tutorial on the Ubuntu forums. Without that, I’d have been stuck to compile and install the right things! Obviously, this is somewhere where Mono can do much better with pre-compiled binaries.
I will post a copy of the tutorial up on the site at some point just in case the site goes down.
PS. If you get the message when compiling XSP that APXS cannot be found, then you need to install the apache2-threaded-dev package. You can do this by running sudo aptitude install apache2-threaded-dev.