Silverlight, is an advanced web application development framework. It is getting popular slowly but steadily, as developers are starting to use it to develop complex web apps.
Surprisingly, its almost impossible to install Silverlight on Linux. So, you can’t access any website or web app that uses Silverlight from a Linux machine.
One solution to this issue is Moonlight. Moonlight is an open source implementation of Silverlight, from the folks at Mono Project. You can use Moonlight as a Silverlight alternative on Linux. There are two different approaches to use it depending upon your Linux environment,
1. You may be running a Linux distro that already has the Moonlight package available for installation. In this case, you just have to install it. For instance, Ubuntu Lucid Lynx already has the package. So you can install it immediately using the Ubuntu Software Center, or via command line,
sudo apt-get install moonlight-plugin-core moonlight-plugin-mozilla
The above command will install Moonlight plugin on Firefox.
2. If your Linux distro do not have the Moonlight package, then you must install it manually. Go to this page and install it as a browser plugin on Linux.
Testing The Silverlight Installation on Linux
After you have installed Silverlight on your Linux machine using one of the methods described above, you must test to check if its working fine. To do that, visit the Silverlight Version Finder app. It will display the version of silverlight installed on your machine. If you see the version as 0.0.00000.0, then it means that silverlight is not installed properly.