You will need as a bare minimum glibc-devel 2.2 (or above), glibc 2.2 (or above) and gcc 3.2 (or above). You can use a version of gcc older than 3.2, but you won't get the better code generation or optimisations available to the newer versions

Dead simple. Find the component you wish to compile, and read the dependancies. For rpm based systems, rpm -q <rpm-name> will tell you if it is installed or not. RPMs are available for most popular distros at rpmfind.net

As of 25th Jan 2005, libpixman and cairo are included with libgdiplus.

NOTE This list is far from complete as I don't have the full mono setup running on my machines. If you have any more to add, please drop me an email and I'll add them in.