In early December 2008 Moonlight 1.0 beta was released by the Mono team, making it possible to run  basic Silverlight 1.0 applications from your Linux Firefox installation. If you are like me mostly working on a Linux workstation, then its likely that you have seen little so far of the Microsoft Silverlight platform. The best way to think of Silverlight 1.0 is as Flash, but then by Microsoft. Similar to Flash, Silverlight installs as a web browser plugin and provides animation, graphics and audio/video. The next generation (Silverlight 2.0) includes support for running C# managed code from the plugin which should make things quite interesting.

What is Moonlight?

Moonlight is an Open Source implementation by Novell and the Mono team of  Microsoft Silverlight. It was born out of a 21 day hacking session by the Mono team in early 2007. This was  possible as much code needed for building Moonlight was already implemented by the Mono team for their C# libraries. Cleaning things up took them a little longer and the first beta was released in December 2008.

Currently Moonlight implements Silverlight 1.0, but work on Silverlight 2.0 has already been started. The Moonlight roadmap shows that we will have to wait a little longer for that though, the first alpha is not planned until April 2009.  Moonlight 2.0 is where things will become really interesting as it will contain a mono implementation allowing you to execute C# or Dynamic Language Runtime based languages.

Installing Moonlight

1. You can install Moonlight 1.0 for Firefox from http://www.go-mono.com/moonlight/
2. If you come across a website that requires video codecs, Moonlight will offer to install the Microsoft codecs for playback.

Testing if things work

Enough dry stuff — I am not expecting miracles from a beta release, but it would of course be nice if somethings do actually work. For some examples have a look at the Moonlight status page of scripts that they have tested their plug-in against:

• http://go-mono.com/moonlight/MoonlightStatus.aspx

Troubleshooting

Not all websites detect Silverlight 1.0 properly, so if you come across a website saying “Silverlight 1.0 not found” you migth need a bit of work. A little GreaseMonkey script can help out here as explained on the MoonLight Quirks page.

Video codecs and legal issues

Through an agreement between Novell and Microsoft it is possible to legally use the Microsoft Codecs for decoding audio and video streams, but only if you download the Moonlight beta’s directly from Novell. As an alternative it should  be possible to compile the Moonlight from source against the open source FFMPEG libraries as mentioned by Miguel de Icaza on his blog: “Currently Moonlight video support has been prototyped using the fabulous and LGPLed ffmpeg engine for video and audio. We are unable to redistribute this code commercially due to licensing conflicts. Update: This means that individuals that want to use a 100% pure free software setup can do so. We are unable to redistribute this edition though. “

Image credit: Moonlight by James Jordan

This is a post from Martijn's C# Coding Blog.

Installing Apache2 , MySQL Server and PHP5

The above has become so easy under Ubuntu that its quite unbelievable. With just a few lines of typing you too can have a full LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL & PHP) system. There is no need for the hours previously spend on hunting for dependencies to download and compile.

sudo apt-get install apache2
sudo apt-get install mysql-server
sudo apt-get install php5 php5-mysql php5-cli php5-dev
php -v

As a bonus: I also installed my favorite HTML editor: BlueFish

sudo apt-get install bluefish

And that is it really — everything works from here on. If you would like to get a bit more juice out of PHP5 you can also add the following:

Configure PHP5 with eaccelerator

PHP is a great language for building websites but it can be quite slow at times. Each time a script is run PHP needs to compile it and then execute it. You can gain speed by using a cache such as eaccelerator. This stores the compiled scripts in both memory and on disk so that frequently called scripts run much faster.

The following steps compile and install eacelerator 0.9.5.3, you can check for a newer version on the eacellerator website.

sudo apt-get install build-essential
cd /tmp
wget http://bart.eaccelerator.net/source/0.9.5.3/eaccelerator-0.9.5.3.tar.bz2
bzip2 -cd eaccelerator-0.9.5.3.tar.bz2 | tar xf -
cd eaccelerator-0.9.5.3
/usr/bin/phpize
./configure
make
sudo make install

After the above you should now have a file named eaccelerator.so in directory/usr/lib/php5/20060613+lfs/ (or whatever directory was printed when you did ‘make install’).

Now you need to configure php to include the eacelerator module on startup by editing the relevant php.ini file:

sudo gedit /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini

Add the following lines to the php.ini file:

; Installing the ZEND extension
zend_extension=”/usr/lib/php5/20060613+lfs/eaccelerator.so”
eaccelerator.shm_size=”0″
eaccelerator.cache_dir=”/var/local/eaccelerator”
eaccelerator.enable=”1″
eaccelerator.optimizer=”1″
eaccelerator.check_mtime=”1″
eaccelerator.debug=”0″
eaccelerator.shm_only=”0″
eaccelerator.compress=”1″
eaccelerator.compress_level=”9″
eaccelerator.allowed_admin_path=”/var/www/apache2-default/control.php”

Finally we need to create the cache directory used by eaccelerator to store the compiled scripts:

cd /var/local
sudo mkdir eaccelerator
sudo chown root:www-data /var/local/eaccelerator/
sudo chmod u=rwx,g=rwx,o= /var/local/eaccelerator/

Restart Apache2 and see if it loads correctly:

sudo apache2ctl configtest
sudo apache2ctl graceful

Test the PHP5 installation

Create a small file in “/var/www/” to test your PHP5 installation

sudo gedit /var/www/php5.php

And add the following in this file:

Now load http://localhost/php5.html to see if your system is correctly configured. If eaccelerator is properly configured it should also be listed here.

This is a post from Martijn's C# Coding Blog.

This is a post from Martijn's C# Coding Blog.