F# interactive fails to load with “error FS0078: Unable to find the file 'System' in any of…”

Question

I am running Fedora 16, which gives me mono 2.10.5, but no F#. I have previously used a locally compiled version of mono, but am now using the packaged version. I am using the latest version of F# from the github repository, installed to a local directory (I do not have root on this machine).

When I run fsharpi (or mono path/to/file/fsi.exe) I receive the following error:

mono /home/scratch/local2/lib/mono/4.0/fsi.exe 

Microsoft (R) F# 2.0 Interactive build (private)
Copyright (c) 2002-2011 Microsoft Corporation. All Rights Reserved.

For help type #help;;

> 

error FS0078: Unable to find the file 'System' in any of
 /usr/lib64/mono/4.0
 /home/scratch/.../<current directory>
 /home/scratch/local2/lib/mono/4.0/

Googling yields some similar results, but the missing file is always a .dll. System.dll is certainly in /usr/lib64/mono/4.0.

Answer 1

Well, I reverted to a slightly older version of F# from github before a recent merge from codeplex and everything works correctly. I have filed this as an issue here: https://github.com/fsharp/fsharp/issues/16

Answer 2

I don't know if this will help or not (I realize it's discussing Ubuntu) but for what it's worth:

http://marinosc.webfactional.com/f-on-ubuntu-linux-with-mono-and-monodevelop/

To summarize the article in question:

• Install mono
• Setup parallel mono environment
• Install F#
• Install monodevelop dependencies
• Install monodevelop
• Install F# bindings

EDIT: Prior link was dead.

NB: This article is from 2011. It's extremely likely that the situation has changed in 8 years.