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Silverlight Installation on Linux

August 18, 2007
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Don’t tell anyone but I’ve been playing with Ubuntu on an extra server. I am having fun trying out MonoDevelop and seeing what of my apps run on Mono.  Of course everyone knows I’ve been neck deep in Silverlight for a while so I navigated to my website using Firefox. I viewed the recent AJAX sample I blogged about earlier to see what would happen for Silverlight users on an unsupported platform. Here’s my page on Firefox in Ubuntu (click on the images for full-size):

So far so good!  So I clicked on the “Get Microsoft Silverlight” image in hopes it would take me to a page to install.

Wow, great.  Still good.  Now I don’t expect the installation to work but we’re getting close.  So I clicked the Install Now button.

Disappointment. Sure, I knew it wouldn’t work but going to an undefined page is just silly.  I’d preferred to have seen a page that said that Silverlight wasn’t supported (yet?) on Linux but at least explaining what it was. Too bad really.  It would have been a good opportunity to either educate people about Silverlight or (on the optimistic side of the curve) even point them to Moonlight and encourage them to help Miguel and the boys get Moonlight working!

What do you think?