At home we use a NAS for some time to hold our media an backups, take care of our downloads, airprint jobs and fill my spare time with playing around with the (endless) possibilities. Triggered by Chris’ question I finally installed mono on my synology DS212J, just for the fun of it.

The mono package is in the Utilities section since DSM 5.0. Because it is a beta package you must enable that first. Go into Settings in the top menu of the Package Center, open the Beta tab in the window that opens and check the box “Yes, I want to see beta versions!”.

Now the install will complain if the Web Station is not enabled and offers to take you there. Enable it and start the installation of mono.

When you browse to a non existing aspx page, the error message at the bottom will tell you it is mono / dotnet.

Version Information: 2.11.1 ((no/426188e Wed Apr 9 15:25:51 CST 2014); ASP.NET Version: 2.0.50727.1433

If you’ve enabled SSH there is even more to play with.

You can commandline compile and run all sorts of programs. Just make sure it is mono 2.11.1 and/or dotnet 2.0 compatible.