The open source Mono Project sponsored by Novell has put out a beta release Moonlight 2, the Linux equivalent of Microsoft's Silverlight 2, which gives users a platform to view and use Silverlight and Windows Media content on Linux.

The beta offers improved functionality compared to Moonlight 1, including support for adaptive video streaming and audio playback, which means better streaming of multimedia content based on the quality of the user's connections.

Moonlight 2 also embeds Mono runtime functionality, which is reportedly 300 times faster than the latest JavaScript engine, and gives users increased performance. With the Mono runtime functionality, developers can target Linux with rich Internet applications using C#, Ruby and Python as well as JavaScript.

The widgetry is part of the technical collaboration Novell and Microsoft announced in September of 2007. Microsoft has provided Novell with access to its test suites for Silverlight, and end users of Moonlight get free access to the Microsoft Media Pack, a set of licensed media codecs for video and audio.

Moonlight is licensed under LGPL v2 and is available for all major Linux distributions, including openSUSE, SUSE Linux Enterprise, Fedora, Red Hat and Ubuntu.

See www.go-mono.com.