Novell
and the Mono community announced the first public release of Moonlight,
an implementation of Microsoft's Silverlight RIA (rich Internet
application) platform for Linux.
In a May 13 blog post, Miguel de Icaza,
vice president of developer relations at Novell and head of the Mono
project, said: "Today we are making the first public release of
Moonlight, supporting the Silverlight 1.0 profile for Linux."
The release comes in two forms, de Icaza said. One is with no-media codecs supported, but easy to install: "head to http://www.go-mono.com/moonlight and
click on the cute installer for Moonlight. This currently hosts builds
for Linux x86 and x86-64 for Firefox," de Icaza said.
The other form is "Source-code compilation, but you can optionally
compile FFMpeg codecs yourself. To do this, download our
moon-0.6.tar.bz2. And follow the build instructions," he said in the
blog.
Meanwhile, "Although Moonlight works on Firefox 2 and Firefox 3,
recent changes in Firefox 3 prevent Silverlight and Moonlight from
working (For details see #432371, #430965). There is a user contributed
Greasemonkey script that will work around this bug for some sites
(requires Greasemonkey)," de Icaza wrote.
In addition, Moonlight supports "windowless" mode, a mechanism that
allows Silverlight content to blend with other HTML elements on a page,
de Icaza said. However, this is only supported by Firefox 3. "Users of
older versions of Firefox might run into Silverlight applications and
Web sites that do not work correctly, as many Silverlight applications
depend on this functionality" (Flash sites have the same problem with
Firefox 2), he wrote in his blog.
Moreover, this Moonlight release only supports the Silverlight 1.0
profile. "The 1.1 support is no longer maintained, and the release
happened at the time when we are transitioning the APIs to 2.0," de
Icaza said.
