Mono got me out of a jam about 7-8 years ago.

Had a Gentoo server that needed a Perl application to fetch data from a MS SQL Server.

FreeTDS just would not compile, but Mono installed just fine.

I wrote Inline::MonoCS [0] and everything Just Worked.

[0] http://search.cpan.org/~johnd/Inline-MonoCS-1.000/lib/Inline...