Thursday, 28 June 2007

Silverlight Plug-in Gets Linux Version

Moonlight, a Linux version of Microsoft's new Silverlight multimedia technology is ready for launch with only finishing touches remaining...

Moonlight, a Linux version of Microsoft's new Silverlight multimedia technology is ready for launch with only finishing touches remaining.

A public alpha version of the open source Moonlight software is planned for September or October, said Miguel de Icaza, vice president for the developer platform at Novell and lead developer of Mono, a version of Microsoft's .Net Framework for Linux and Unix. Moonlight is dependent on Mono.

Beta versions of Moonlight will be offered to early adopters in a couple of weeks, said de Icaza. Silverlight is Microsoft's cross-platform browser plug-in software for video and multimedia.
Moonlight also is being extended to work on desktops outside of a browser, de Icaza said.

"It's a really powerful technology. In addition to supporting it on the Web, we're going to stick it on the desktop," de Icaza said.

Developers have had Moonlight running with Novell's Banshee media player and F-Spot photo management software. The desktop implementation of Moonlight is similar in functionality to Microsoft's client-based counterpart to Silverlight, Windows Presentation Foundation, said de Icaza.