Mono 1.1.9 shipped with a port of the JIT engine to the ARM processor and it currently supports the Linux operating system. A few days ago Paolo received his Nokia 770 which is a Linux/Gtk-based PDA. Mono and Gtk# work out of the box on it.
After the Mono JIT port was done using a desktop little-endian ARM computer, Geoff just recompiled it and run it on a Linksys NSLU2 (which runs a ARM processor in big-endian mode). That was pretty cool. I wonder if it is as cool as running mono on a Nokia 770 (no recompilation necessary, just copied the binary from my Debian box). Here it is running our hello world app. Many thanks to the fine folks at Nokia for sending me a prototype so quickly.
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I made tarballs of binaries for use on Linux/ARM systems, including the Nokia 770. And, yes, Gtk# apps work fine on it:-). Happy hacking, you'll find them here.
I added a few links and updated some on the quoted text above.
In addition Paolo made a small video of Gtk# starting up on the Nokia, notice that it starts up very fast.
The NSLU2 has an ARM processor running at 130Mhz. At USD 78.84 it is probably the cheapest machine to run Mono. Geoff boostrapped Mono in about 10 hours on this little machine.
Update: Geoff reports that he un-underclocked his Linksys machine so instead of being a running at 133Mhz he is running it at 266Mhz.
With the machine at 266Mhz compiling Mono 1.1.9 (which includes building the C runtime with gcc and compiling the C# code for the 1.x and 2.x profiles) takes about 9 hours.
Posted on 20 Sep 2005
