The Mono Project, an open source initiative sponsored by Novell, today announced the beta release of Moonlight 2. The first and only open source project that provides Linux users access to Microsoft Silverlight content, Moonlight 2 beta is a Linux equivalent to Microsoft Silverlight 2 that gives users a platform to view and use Silverlight and Windows* Media content on Linux.
The Moonlight 2 beta offers Linux users 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 2 beta is part of the technical collaboration announced by Novell and Microsoft in September of 2007. Microsoft has provided Novell with access to its test suites for Silverlight, and Microsoft provides end users of Moonlight from Novell with free access to the Microsoft Media Pack, a set of licensed media codecs for video and audio. 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.*
To download Moonlight 2 beta, visit www.go-mono.com. For more information on Moonlight, visit www.mono-project.com/Moonlight. To learn more about open source projects that Novell sponsors and contributes to, visit www.novell.com/linux/opensource.