Moonlight 1.0 BETA Makes Linux Users First Class Citizens for Digital Media

2 December 2008

The Moonlight Project and Novell are proud to announce the 1.0 beta release of Moonlight, an implementation of Silverlight for Linux. Moonlight 1.0 is a major step forward in enabling multimedia playback on Linux desktop computers.

With Moonlight 1.0 users on Linux will be able to view Silverlight 1.0 content. This includes WMV video and audio, allowing Linux users to enjoy many Web sites that were previously unsupported on Linux.

The Moonlight 1.0 release is part of a technical collaboration announced by Novell and Microsoft in September of 2007. Microsoft has provided access to its test suites for Silverlight, and a Media Pack for Linux users that includes licensed media codecs for video and audio.

Moonlight is distributed as a Firefox extension, and should run on most major Linux distributions in Firefox 3. It has been tested on SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10, openSUSE 11.0, Ubuntu 8.04, Fedora Core 9.

Source code is also available for Moonlight, so it can be ported to other platforms. Moonlight 1.0 is available under the GNU Library General Public License (LGPL). The Microsoft Media Pack is a product distributed by Microsoft and is available from Microsoft's Web site for use with Moonlight.

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