After long long time I find some freetime to spend to update mono for maemo devices. After a lots of work, at the end I able to compile mono 2.4.3 for the maemo devices. Here you can find the instruction to compile mono for maemo. This instruction are refered by Maemo5 but work also on maemo4 and maemo4.1. I test it only on maemo4.1 device (I have N810 device but unfortunally not a N900 one). Here a the output of "mono --version" from a terminal:

Great to hear! Now, can Qt work with this?

I not test it jet, but works with GTK# and Winform even if the winform application are not hildonized at the moment.

About the WinForm I'm making some test

About the GTK# you can try this application

http://code.google.com/p/monkeysmemory-n800/

that was developed a lots of time ago.

Best Regards

There seems to be a grey area with QT support.

I think there was two rival bindings for QT. I think one was "discontinued".

I think Qyoto bindings is still active.

The bindings are based on a system called Smoke.

BTW: What is the performance like (e.g. cpu utilisation and memory use)?

johel, do you talk about mono performance in general or using a specific environment?

I not make speed test, but I can say that using GTK# with maemo-sharp for hildon integration, the application seems to be fast. Using winform the startup of application is very slow ...

I will try to make some test, but unfortunally I have only a N810 device so I not able to see if the behaviour on N900 device.

I've used mono on the desktop and subjectively compared it to Java.

As a runtime mono seems usable on a "low powered" cpu (e.g. 450mhz) and memory consumption seems lower compared to Java.

I just wondered how usable this "arm" version of mono is on your n810.

You know - maybe I shloud just install it myself and try it myself.

It's great there is another programming option for maemo. It would be nice to develop stuff for mono and then use the same binary on n900 & n8x0 devices.

I'd definitely be interested in using this, actually - is there any N900-specific documentation anywhere?

For normal application seems to be fast enought.
Moreover this version is a complete stack of mono, is not a reduced version.

I already try to "port" (simply copy from my desktop) a winform testing application created using Visual Studio and works. The problem is:
- slow to startup the application
- is not integrated in the Hildon environment so you not see in the task list, and so on
- unfortunally some winform action caused the crash of the application because is not supported by hildon (example you cannot ask to the window to go maximized )

Regards the compatibility from N810 and N900 there is a specific assemby - maemo-sharp that is automatic generated by hildon include file that can be different between N810 and N900. If anyone not use N900 specific function I think that you can build the application for one device and run on the other.

Obviously the runtime need to be the right version, FREMANTLE use glib 2.30.3 while DIABLO use glib2.12.12 and so on ...

Finally, today I spend some time to make some test using a real winform application on my N810 device.

This application use a config file, a socket and a nontrivial winform interface to show the status of specific software server. This interface use tab pane dock to the full window, a detaililed list, and change the color of the row when a specific process is in running.

I simply copy the binary from the windows server to my OpenSuSE linux machine and on my N810 maemo device. On OpenSuSE I have no problem with the latest version of mono. On Maemo device I not able to run the release version of application, so I try to run the Debug version with the "--debug" option. Now the application start perfectly. Here there is some screenshot taken from Windows, OpenSuSE and N810

Here there is some screenshot from Windows platform, linux platform and Maemo4 platform.

@mk8: I'm very interested in Mono on Maemo. Thanks for you work.
Could you update you last posting, the links seem to be gone...

thanks