You will need to obtain the Mono dependencies first: glib 2.x (http://www.gtk.org) and pkg-config (http://www.freedesktop.org/software/pkgconfig).
Building From Packages
This applies to both the officially released packages (http://www.go-mono.com/mono-downloads/download.html), as well as the daily tarball packages (http://www.go-mono.com/daily/).
Unpack the Mono runtime distribution:
tar xzvf mono-X.XX.tar.gz; cd mono-X.XX
Then configure, compile and install:
./configure --prefix=/usr/local; make; make install
This will give you a runtime, C# compiler and runtime libraries, where /usr/local is the prefix where Mono will be installed. You can change this to suit your needs.
If you are not using GNU/Linux system (such as Solaris or BSD variants), make sure to use GNU make.
