I generally do not recommend populating the content in the db on a dev machine and then moving it to production. Its especially problematic if the url structure will be different on production like http://localhost/mojo on dev and then http://somedomain.com on production, you will end up with broken urls and images if the structure is different. I generally recommend creating your content on production and then restore a backup of the db on dev if you want to test with production data.
Moving from one server to another is basically a matter of backing up the db, restore on the new machine, backup the files and restore on the new machine. If the url is staying the same across machines it should be straightforward. Your mileage may vary.
Moving to Mono you will encounter bugs, there are bugs in Mono, so far I do not recommend installing mission critical web apps on linux/Mono. Mono keeps getting better and I hope to be confident to recommend it at some point (maybe the next release). For less importnat apps or testing it may be acceptable.
Hope it helps,
Joe