Follow these instructions to install a snapshot of mono trunk on a Debian Etch box
The latest snapshot can be found here:
http://mono.ximian.com/monobuild/sna...sources-trunk/
apt-get install gcc libtool bison pkg-config libglib2.0-dev wget http://mono.ximian.com/monobuild/snapshot/snapshot_sources/mono/mono-118180.tar.bz2 tar xfvj mono-118180.tar.bz2 cd mono-118180 ./configure --prefix=/opt/mono-trunk make make install
Once installed the binaries will be in: /opt/mono-trunk/bin
You can call them explicitly using the full path: /opt/mono-trunk/bin/gmcs
Or set your $PATH variable by editing ~/.bashrc and adding a line like this:
export PATH=/opt/mono-trunk/bin:$PATH
Then verify by running
mono --version gmcs --version