Purge Your System Of Mono

Updated 18/6/2012 for Mint 13 "Maya" / Ubuntu 12.04 "Precise"

If you are not overly happy with having a bastard child of Microsoft installed on your systems and the potential patent issues that may arise from its use then this simple one liner will purge your system of mono and anything that depends on it.

Make sure you read the list of packages to be removed that the apt-get command provides before you go ahead and do it.

sudo apt-get purge mono-4.0-gac

This will remove the following from your system.

The following packages will be REMOVED:
  banshee* libappindicator0.1-cil* libdbus-glib1.0-cil* libdbus1.0-cil* libgconf2.0-cil* libgdata1.9-cil*
  libgkeyfile1.0-cil* libglib2.0-cil* libgmime2.6-cil* libgtk-sharp-beans-cil* libgtk2.0-cil* libgudev1.0-cil*
  liblaunchpad-integration1.0-cil* libmono-addins-gui0.2-cil* libmono-addins0.2-cil* libmono-cairo4.0-cil*
  libmono-corlib4.0-cil* libmono-i18n-west4.0-cil* libmono-i18n4.0-cil* libmono-posix4.0-cil*
  libmono-security4.0-cil* libmono-sharpzip4.84-cil* libmono-system-configuration4.0-cil*
  libmono-system-core4.0-cil* libmono-system-drawing4.0-cil* libmono-system-security4.0-cil*
  libmono-system-xml4.0-cil* libmono-system4.0-cil* libmono-zeroconf1.0-cil* libnotify0.4-cil* libtaglib2.0-cil*
  mint-meta-cinnamon-dvd* mono-4.0-gac* mono-gac* mono-runtime* tomboy*
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 36 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
After this operation, 34.3 MB disk space will be freed.

If you are happy to lose that stuff, in particular the Banshee audio player then go ahead hit "y" to nuke Mono once and for all*

* Actually, next time you do a dist-upgrade you are likely to have the mono infection return to your system. In such cases just reapply this treatment.