Although a significant amount of progress has been made in the effort to achieve Silverlight 2.0 compatibility, the plugin is still at a relatively early stage of development and will require more work before it's production-ready. It was easy to install and it loaded as expected when it encountered Silverlight content.

I tested the Moonlight 2.0 preview on Ubuntu 9.04 with Firefox 3.0.10. The plugin will obtain a binary codec pack automatically from Microsoft after prompting the user. The only component of Moonlight that cannot be redistributed or included out of the box are the codecs. The Moonlight plugin itself is entirely open source and freely redistributable. It uses several pieces of Microsoft's Silverlight stack, such as the Dynamic Language Runtime and Microsoft's Silverlight controls, which Microsoft has made available under the open source MS-PL license. The entire plugin is roughly 9MB and it bundles the Mono virtual machine and other necessary runtime components.

It is distributed as a Firefox plugin and is supported on both 32-bit and 64-bit Linux distributions. Moonlight 2.0 preview is available for download from the Mono project's website. It was also used to build Moonshine, a browser plugin that uses Moonlight to play conventional Windows media streaming video content at a variety of websites. Moonlight 1.0, which was released earlier this year, enabled Linux users to view the Obama administration's official inauguration ceremony video stream. The Redmond giant agreed to contribute to the effort by supplying documentation, test cases, and fully licensed codecs so that Moonlight can deliver full Silverlight compatibility to Linux users. It later gained official backing from Microsoft. The Moonlight project was first launched in 2007 as an experimental project undertaken by Novell's Mono team.

The new version of Moonlight introduces compatibility with critical Silverlight 2.0 features, such as widgets and support for managed code. The developers behind the Moonlight project, an open source implementation of Microsoft's Silverlight media framework, have released a preview of Moonlight 2.0.

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