BANGALORE, INDIA: Moonlight is an open source implementation of MS Silverlight by Novell, for Linux users. As it's Mono- based, you must have Mono packages installed on your system, which the latest distros such as Ubuntu and Fedora come packed with.

Others can use Moonlight as a Firefox plugin that can be downloaded from go-mono.com/ moonlight. By launching the installation dialog box, you can install the Moonlight plugin on Firefox. However, if Firefox blocks the installation, you can unblock it by adding this URL to the list of allowed sites.

After a mandatory restart of the Firefox browser, you can start using Silverlight based apps on your browser. The plugin is right now available only for Firefox 2 and testing for Firefox 3 is going on. You also have an alpha release of Moonlight that supports Silverlight 2.0.

Without a Moonlight plugin installed on your browser, the Silverlight based effects can't be seen on Microsoft's homepage. But it prompts you to install Silverlight.	From the Moonlight website you can choose the version and architecture support, and then by clicking on 'install' the installation process is initiated.

Once the plugin gets installed and Firefox has been restarted, the Moonlight plugin shows up as an Add-On that can be disabled or uninstalled.	After Silverlight has been installed, the web page in Step 1 gets converted to a more snazzy looking page with a lot more graphically intense effects.