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I just got hold of my first Raspberry PI Rev 2 yesterday (512 MB) + a 32 GB SD card.

Connected LAN, USB mouse+keyboard and downloaded Raspbian "Wheezy"and extracted it. Everything worked and looked smooth.

As a software developer with C/C++/C# experience in my bag, I havent spend much time with Linux so consider me a complete newbie on that matter.

I will try to follow this one, once I figure out where to write the console commands...

http://www.raspberry-sharp.org/eric-bezine/2012/10/mono-framework/installing-mono-raspberry-pi/

I would like to use GUI for my MONO applications and I will develop them on my Windows 7 machine. using either MonoDeveloper or VisualStudio 2010 (I like the IDE better for general coding).

If it matters, I dont need "the rest" of the OS, like browsers, programs etc. My programs will go fullscreen and "take over" the OS so the user dont need access to desktop.

I will only need LAN, SOUND and USB though for input and output.

My question for this is therefore:

IS Raspbian the distro to use for eg. MONO 2.0 and MONO 3.5? (I am fully aware that 4.0 isnt ready) or should I look for another distribution?

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    Raspbian should work fine.
    – Jivings
    Commented Feb 22, 2013 at 22:14
  • yup thats what I found out myself last night. Thanks anyways!
    – BerggreenDK
    Commented Feb 23, 2013 at 13:15
  • Btw. dont expand your OS into the full SDcard unless needed. Because if you like me, make a card backup off your installation before you go nuts, it will take more than half an hour to clone 32 GB into an image + it will take up 32 GB space, eventhough your Raspbian only fills 2-3 GB of them. So I have just bought some 8 GB SANDISK cards instead (30mbit read instead of 20mbit)
    – BerggreenDK
    Commented Feb 25, 2013 at 21:43
  • @BerggreenDK : You certainly don't need to dd a filesystem to back it up or duplicate it. This is like saying, "I have a 1 TB harddrive with a few files on it, so to to back it up I copied all trillion bytes to an image file" -- just plain nuts. Furthermore, there are a number of very good reasons to make a filesystem as large as possible; it minimizes the effects of fragmentation and, for quality SD cards which use "wear leveling", will significantly increase the lifespan of the card. So you are handing out some VERY VERY bad advice here, and you made a mistake buying smaller cards.
    – goldilocks ♦
    Commented Feb 25, 2013 at 22:50
  • @goldilocks - okay, I take your point, but I use the small cards for test setup, not the "production" version. But tell me, HOW would you make a backup of them from eg. Windows 7? unless you binary read the whole card?
    – BerggreenDK
    Commented Feb 26, 2013 at 23:55

1 Answer 1

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Ahh, it seems that its rather simple.

I've decided to go for the default image from Raspberry PI website. The Raspbian Wheezy distribution.

Then after completing the installation, I just used 

$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install mono-runtime

Case closed, problem solved.

Btw. to move files back and forth, I've mounted a cifs folder, so when I place new compiled files from MonoStudio on the PC, I can just run it on the PI = maximum compile speed on Intel Core i7 @4600 mhz and still real hardware to run it on.

BUG REMARK!

Currently (february 2013) the current mono-runtime has some serious issues with DateTime because of hardfp. I havent tested this on softfp as I cant get the image to run after download, but the error with DateTime seems to be regarding the string output when formatting. You can still pull the bits and parts like Year, Day, Month, but the function to combine them into a "normal datetime string" will have to be a fix/patch of your own.

I'm currently not aware of other important bugs. But if I find any, I'll edit this answer again.

Happy coding people!

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  • 1
    You might want to update this answer based on your later question on the hardfp bug with Mono.
    – rsgoheen
    Commented Feb 24, 2013 at 11:01
  • @rsgoheen Great idea!
    – BerggreenDK
    Commented Feb 25, 2013 at 21:37

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