Moonlight is an open source implementation of Microsoft’s Silverlight targeted at Linux and Unix/X11 systems. Moonlight has been developed under the Mono project since September 2007 and is sponsored by Novell. Moonlight 1.0 Beta 1 has been released to the general public.
Novell and Mono have announced the release of Moonlight 1.0 Beta 1 available for 32 bit and 64 bit Linux systems. The currently supported operating systems are: SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10, openSUSE 11.0, Ubuntu 8.04, Fedora Core 9 for 32 bit machines, and SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 and openSUSE 11.0 for 64 bit machines. The recommended browser is Firefox 3 due to its support for windowless operation, a feature commonly used by Silverlight.
Moonlight 1.0 is planned to be released into production on January 20th, 2009. It uses Media Pack 1.0 for video/audio playback, Silverlight 2.0’s adaptive streaming, and the next features:
- Silverlight 1.0 compatible engine.
- Scriptable with the browser JavaScript.
- C/C++ based, no managed code.
- Distribution: Linux/x86 and Linux/x86-64.
- Source code releases for any other operating systems
Moonlight 2.0 is planned as Beta for April 2009 and production in September 2009, and it intends to implement all Silverlight 2.0 features including:
- Silverlight 2.0 compatible engine.
- Deep Zoom
- Control framework
- Layout framework.
- Microsoft Media Pack 2.0 for playing video and audio.
- Includes Mono for executing code (C# and DLR-based languages).
- Runs the Silverlight 2.0 MS-PL controls and 2.0 based applications.
Miguel de Icaza’s blog post explains how the multimedia stack works in Moonlight.
The source code can be downloaded in a tar ball or from the SVN: “svn co svn://anonsvn.mono-project.com/source/tags/moon/1.0b1”. The license is GNU LGPL while Microsoft’s Covenant promises “not to sue … for … use of Moonlight Implementations”.