Running Rainy on Raspbian/arm-hf on my Raspberry Pi

For some time, mono did only support the arm-el (soft-float) platform. But luckily, thanks to the works of Alex Rønne Peterson the latest mono git master code is capable of running on the arm-hf (hard-float) platform. This is important for most RaspberryPi users that are running Raspbian. Raspbian is a Debian flavor recompiled for arm-hf to exploit the RaspberryPi’s hard-float capabilities that quite some RPi users have installed (including myself). So up until now, your only choice to run Rainy was to stick with Debian Wheezy for armel. But given the latest additions to the mono runtime this is not the case anymore.

To run Rainy on the more popular Raspbian, you’d need to fetch latest mono master from  GitHub and compile from scratch. This took around 18h on my RPi. Sounds much? Yes, indeed. That is why I created a precompiled bundle of Rainy 0.5.0 compiled into native (arm-hf) code. You don’t even need to install mono at all as it has the mono runtime embedded into the fat binary, which is thus 12 Megabyte large.

Get precompiled Rainy for Raspbian 0.5.0 from here.

UPDATE: I was notified that there are issues with this binary, complaining about missing mscorlib.dll. I am investigating this and will post updates in this blog as soon as there are news on this.

UPDATE2: The issue with missing mscorlib.dll was fixed in newer mono versions, run “make linux_bundle” on the Pi to create a statically linked version of Rainy. Binaries for download will soon be available.

I will soon move the Rainy testserver installation  to my Raspberry Pi, depending on the stability of the mono build.
UPDATE: While Rainy runs fine on the RaspberryPi, it is somewhat slow. Although it is sufficient for a small group of users, the Demoserver is used by many to get a first glance of Rainy and I want it to perform as good as possible. So I’ve moved the Demoserver  to the smallest instance of a DigitalOcean SSD based droplet which costs only $5/month. You can get your own Droplet and support Rainy’s development by using this referral link to DigitalOcean.