Feedback on ClipFlair Studio application Linux  Viewed 79861 time(s), 9 post(s), 10/2/2013 11:54:49 AM - by Stavroula

Moonlight (porting Silverlight from scratch to Linux in the context of project mono) is abandoned since most of its team moved to Xamarin (where they concentrate on .net compilers for Android and Apple's iOS). So only Silverlight 2 compatibility is available (Moonlight 2) and there is also a Moonlight 3.5 beta which has most features of Silverlight 4 (we're using Silverlight 5)

However, I found a better option for Linux, to use PipeLight plugin which runs the real Silverlight 5 from Microsoft inside a Mozilla Firefox build under the well known WINE platform (Windows API emulation layer). That plugin makes the user's web browser talk to the firefox instance (send mouse events etc.) so that it fully integrates as if the Silverlight 5 was running in the user's native Linux-based webbrowser (the user doesn't realize it's a Firefox running under WINE, hosting Silverlight plugin in it turn that does the graphics display)

Will try it with Ubuntu/Edubuntu and see into making a tutorial video on how to install / use with CliFlair - anyone interested can try it from http://fds-team.de/cms/articles/2013-08/pipelight-using-silverlight-in-linux-browsers.html

"an appliance providing wine-pipelight, chromium and firefox. The appliance is available at: http://susestudio.com/a/e856HS/wine-pipelight    It's a 64bit image, with pipelight-0.2.1 and wine-1.7.5 (including the pipelight patches). The user agent switches (plugins) for Chromium and Firefox are not added, that's left to the appliance user.   Have fun! " from http://fds-team.de/cms/articles/2013-08/pipelight-using-silverlight-in-linux-browsers-comments.html

Note that one has to use some user agent switcher plugin for Chromimum and Firefox on Linux since they don't want our server to detect it's a Linux, but think it's a classic Firefox or similar browser on Windows. Those plugins usually show some menu item to select what browser/platform their web browser will pose as (that is what user-agent string [the web browser "identity"] it will send to the web server)

Here is more info on how you can use a user-agent switcher in case our site doesn't see Pipelight on Linux

https://answers.launchpad.net/pipelight/+faq/2351

Note that PipeLight plugin uses Wine for Windows API emulation and currently Wine only supports audio playback, not audio recording (at least not via the APIs that Silverlight uses for audio recording)

PipeLight has its own dedicated website now with detailed instructions on how to set it up and enable Silverlight support through it:
http://pipelight.net/cms/installation.html

It is also working on Chrome/Chromium, but since those are phasing out Netscape Plugin API (NPAPI) support, better use it with Mozilla Firefox instead (internally PipeLight uses Firefox anyway)