First public release of Silverlight for Linux is out

The first public release of Moonlight -- the Silverlight on Linux project from open-source leader Miguel de Icaza and his band of coders -- is out.

De Icaza, Novell Vice President for Developer Technologies, noted the release in a blog post dated May 13. De Icaza noted the release is available to testers in two forms: A no-media-codec-based version and one which will allow users to compile FFMpeg codecs themselves.

The release supports Silverlight 1.0 only. The developers plan to move to support Silverlight 2.0, which is currently in beta and expected to launch in final form later this summer.

De Icaza noted that Moonlight will work on Firefox 2 and 3, but some recent changes in nFirefox 3 "preent Silverlight and Moonlight from working." There is a user-contributed Greasemonkey script that provides a work-around for some sites, he said.

De Icaza said in December to expect the first release of Silverlight to be done by mid-2008.