The promised beta release of Moonlight 1.0, the Linux implementation of Microsoft's Silverlight widgetry, has finally wended its way out.

Moonlight is of course the open source implementation of Microsoft's Silverlight and should give Linux users the same rich, high-definition media capabilities available to the Windows and Apple environments.

They will be able to view Silverlight 1.0 content, including WMV video and audio, and access web sites previously unsupported on Linux.

The widgetry comes as an open source plug-in for the Firefox 3 browser and has been tested on SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10, openSUSE 11.0, Ubuntu 8.04 and Fedora Core 9.

Moonlight source code is also available and can be ported to other platforms. It is available under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL).

The Moonlight 1.0 release is part of a technical collaboration between by Novell and Microsoft that started in September of 2007.

Microsoft has provided access to its test suites for Silverlight and a Media Pack for Linux users that includes licensed media codecs for video and audio. The Media Pack is distributed by Microsoft and is available from its web site for use with Moonlight.