Mono on Ubuntu 14.04

By Philipp Wagner | January 15, 2016

There is an open source project called Mono, which provides a .NET-compatible set of tools, a C# compiler and Common Language Runtime (CLR). This makes it possible to run C# code in Linux. I wanted to see, if TinyCsvParser works in Linux and I was pleasantly surprised, that all Unit Tests succeeded without touching a single line of code.

Installing the latest stable release Mono 4.2 on a fresh Ubuntu installation is easy.

Adding the project GPG signing key and the package repository

Switch into a Terminal of your choice and add the Mono project signing key and the repository to

sudo apt-key adv --keyserver hkp://keyserver.ubuntu.com:80 --recv-keys 3FA7E0328081BFF6A14DA29AA6A19B38D3D831EF
echo "deb http://download.mono-project.com/repo/debian wheezy main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/mono-xamarin.list
sudo apt-get update

Installing Mono

Once the package list has been updated, you can install Mono 4.2 by running:

sudo apt-get install mono-complete

Installing MonoDevelop

The easiest way to build a .NET project with Mono is to use the MonoDevelop IDE.

sudo apt-get install monodevelop

Installing the MonoDevelop NUnit Plugin

In order to run the NUnit Unit Tests, you should install the NUnit Plugin for MonoDevelop:

sudo apt-get install monodevelop-nunit

You can show the sidebar with the Unit Tests from the Menu bar with:

Menu Bar: View -> Pads -> Unit Tests