gdal/mono/linux; Native bindings, PInvoke, and tracking TypeLoader exceptions

First I want to express how impressed I am with how well mono performs (both speed and stability).


I'm trying to get native bindings working for gdal 1.5.1  (or any version of gdal) in Linux.  If anyone has knowledge of gdal/mono/linux bindings that would be great.  

If not, then I suppose a general discussion of native bindings is the next step.  I'm outside my comfort zone, and struggling to even phrase the question. But here are my observations. When I compile gdal in linux it creates libraries and executables such as:

gdalconst_csharp.dll
gdal_csharp.dll
ogr_csharp.dll
osr_csharp.dll
GDALInfo.exe

So when I run the command 'mono GDALInfo.exe' it returns a usage statement. no errors. But when I run 'mono GDALinfo.exe foo.tif', I get a type-loader exception.

===================
ANALYSIS
===================
Each library has a dllmap config mapping. For anyone who is interested in getting gdal to work in mono/linux I believe that the dllmap  generated by the GNUMakefile has an error.  The build process generates the following...
<dllmap dll="gdal_wrap" target="libgdalcsharp.la" >

But this is missing the closing "/" for the Xml tag, so it should look like this.
<dllmap dll="gdal_wrap" target="libgdalcsharp.la" />

============================
?WHAT's MISSING?
============================
The build also creates gdal_wrap.lo, ogr_wrap.lo, etc. But it doesn't produce a .so file for these, it doesn't produce a gdal_wrap.dll or a dllmap. I'm pretty sure this is a problem, because those are the libraries which contain the native bindings. At least, they do in Windows.

I tried creating gdal_wrap.so
gcc -shared -Wl,-soname,libgdal_wrap.so.1 -o libgdal_wrap.so.1.0.1  gdal_wrap.o

It didn't help.

I ran the command with 'mono -verbose'. See attached file.
output3.txt


I ran the command 'mono-shlib-cop gdal_csharp.dll'. It produced the following.

error: in OSGeo.GDAL.GdalPINVOKE.UseExceptions: Could not load library `gdal_wrap': ./libgdal_wrap.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
error: in OSGeo.GDAL.GdalPINVOKE.DontUseExceptions: Could not load library `gdal_wrap': ./libgdal_wrap.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
error: in OSGeo.GDAL.GdalPINVOKE.Debug: Could not load library `gdal_wrap': ./libgdal_wrap.so: cannot



============================
CONCLUSIONS
============================
From what I've read if the library is named properly (libgdal_wrap.so in linux, gdal_wrap.dll in windows), and if the file exists in the path (PATH in Windows, LD_LIBRARY_PATH in Linux) the native bindings should work.

If anyone has advice on gdal, on native-bindings, or on tracking down type-loader-exceptions help is appreciated. Thanks...