After reading a post from my friend Daniel about the new release of MonoDevelop, I decided to try and install it... which is when I realized that the installation from source is so painful I'd better figure it out and share it with everybody else. The first thing we'll need to do is install all the prerequisite development library packages so we can link against them when we build. This will take quite a long time, especially the monodoc installation. You should note that the mono runtime is installed by default in Feisty, which is why it doesn't appear in this list. If you try this on a different release you'll want to make sure to install that as well.

sudo apt-get install mono-devel build-essential mono-gmcs libmono-dev libpango1.0-dev libgtk2.0-dev libgtksourceview2.0-cil libgecko2.0-cil monodoc libmono-system-runtime2.0-cil libmono-cairo2.0-cil gettext

Now you'll want to download, extract and untar the latest source code into a directory of your choice. (You'll want to make sure 0.16 is still the latest)

wget http://go-mono.com/sources/monodevelop/monodevelop-0.16.tar.bz2 bunzip2 monodevelop-0.16.tar.bz2 tar xvf monodevelop-0.16.tar cd monodevelop-0.16

Now we can start the compilation, and you'll notice that the ./configure line passes in the prefix option so that it will install in the correct directory.

./configure --prefix=`pkg-config --variable=prefix mono` make sudo make install

At this point MonoDevelop should be installed. You can launch it with Alt+F2 by entering monodevelop into the run box.

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MonoDevelop is really coming along since the last time I used it, although there are still a lot of bugs. The most notable missing feature is the lack of integrated debugger...  

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Tested on a clean Feisty install. Download MonoDevelop from monodevelop.com