Microsoft To Bring Silverlight To Moblin Linux

Microsoft has announced plans to bring its Silverlight technology to Moblin Linux. This is the first time the company has mentioned anything about Silverlight running on any Linux distribution. Up until now the only way to access Silverlight content including web video and interactive web media on a Linux system was to use Moonlight, an open-source implementation of Silverlight developed by Novell and Microsoft.

Moblin is an Linux Foundation project and is an open source Linux-based system for next generation devices, primarily those based on Intel Atom hardware. Moblin can run on netbooks/PCs, phones and other mobile Internet devices, or MIDs. A beta of Moblin Version 2, optimized for nettops/netbooks, went to testers on September 23. Intel’s press release today said “operating system support for Microsoft Silverlight will be expanded to include Moblin early next year.”

Microsoft isn't making a big deal of the Linux portion of today's announcement. Rather, the company is demonstrating that Silverlight plays well with computers using the Intel Atom processor. During an event at the Intel Developer's Forum in San Francisco, officials from Microsoft and Intel showed a demo of Silverlight running on Intel Atom powered devices running both Windows 7 and Moblin Linux. Of course, Silverlight has been running perfectly well on Intel Atom powered netbooks running Windows for the past year and a half, so that's no big surprise.

The question is, if Silverlight is going to run on Moblin, does that mean other Linux distributions like Ubuntu, Fedora, and OpenSUSE will be supported in the future?

[via ZDNet]