As a developer my initial plan was to develop something running on Raspberry Pi. Unfortunately being a .NET developer and playing around with Microsoft stack all the time, my arsenal for Linux development is very limited. Before I master Python, I wanted to run small applications using Mono. This would be a good chance to see how smoothly .NET programs can run independent from the platform.

So I booted my Raspberry Pi with a Raspbian image (hard-float ABI). And installed Mono runtime and MonoDevelop IDE.

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

Launched MonoDevelop eagerly to write my first Hello World program on Raspberry Pi and boom! I got the following error:

The good old “Object reference not set to an instance of an object” exception!

After searching around I found out that Mono doesn’t run on Raspbian image and it requires an image with “soft-float ABI“. Turns out soft-float version runs floating point operations using software instead of FPU (Floating Point Unit). Therefore soft-float version it is slower than Raspbian. I quickly downloaded the soft-float image and tried to boot it up again. This time I couldn’t even see the login screen. It got stuck at a stage saying “Waiting for /dev to be fully populated” After some time it timed out and started giving some errors.

Having no idea what’s going on, consulted Google again and found out other people had the same problem. The proposed solution was to replace start.elf with the one from the hard-float image. I tried running it with the replaced elf file but got the same result. I’ve been doing all these experiments on my new Raspberry Pi which is 512MB. Having failed where others seemed to succeed, I put the blame on the hardware I’m using and decided to try the same image with the old Pi. The result was promising: I could boot the Pi with the soft-float version finally. I installed the Mono runtime and MonoDevelop again but looks like MonoDevelop is above Pi’s paygrade! It was excruciatingly slow that I decided to create the sample project on my desktop PC and carry it over with a USB flash drive. Mounted the flash drive using the following commands (replace tosh with directory name you want and make sure you’re mounting the correct device.)

sudo mkdir /media/tosh
sudo mount -t vfat -o uid=pi,gid=pi /dev/sda1 /media/tosh/

Here comes the moment of truth. I changed the directory to the copied files and ran the exe file. Here’s the output:

The screen glares but at the bottom of the screen you can see the glowing (by all means) phrase: Hello World! Of course, this is just the beginning. I’ll see how compatible and reliable Mono framework is after I deploy more complex applications on Raspberry Pi.