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This is the latest iteration to come out of the September 2007 technical collaboration agreement between Microsoft and Novell to give access to Microsoft's test suites for Silverlight and also to provide a media pack for Linux users containing licensed media codecs for video and audio. The stated goals of the project (as announced on the website are "to run Silverlight applications on Linux, to provide a Linux SDK to build Silverlight applications and to reuse the Silverlight engine we have built for desktop applications."
Claimed improvements for this version include "improved functionality compared to Moonlight 1, including support for adaptive streaming of video and audio playback. This feature allows for better streaming of multimedia content based on the quality of the user's connections. Moonlight 2 also embeds Mono runtime functionality, which is 300 times faster than the latest Javascript engine, and gives users increased performance. With the inclusion of the Mono runtime functionality, developers can now target Linux with rich Internet applications using a wide variety of programming languages, including C#, Ruby and Python as well as Javascript."
Moonlight from Novell is licensed under LGPL v2 and is available for all major Linux distributions, including openSUSE, SUSE Linux Enterprise, Fedora, Red Hat and Ubuntu.
Moonlight 2 is available here and additional information can be accessed here.
