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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 “The 1.1 support is no longer maintained, and the release happened at the time when we are transitioning the APIs to 2.0,” de Icaza said.