Fiber optic testing blog

A few days ago we received an email with a question about getting Fiberizer Cloud work on Ubuntu.

Unfortunately, Silverlight plugin on which Fiberizer Cloud is built doesn't support any Linux-based systems. That gap should have been filled by an open source implementation of Silverlight for Linux the Moonlight project. The last version of Moonlight which targeted Silverlight 4 was released in early 2011, but since then the project was discontinued. As Fiberizer Cloud uses the latest 5.1 Silverlight version, there is no way it will work with Moonlight.

The good news there is a solution. It came out less than a half year ago with a project named Pipelight. The project allows you to run Silverlight 5.1 application on Linux browsers supporting Netscape Plugin API (Firefox, Chrome / Chromium, Midori, Opera, etc). If you care about technical details you can read it here. In a not very technical nutshell, a Silverlight application starts as a Windows process which runs officially supported Silverlight 5.1 through patched Wine.

The installation of Pipelight is simple for most popular Linux distributions (Ubuntu, Arch Linux, Debian, openSuse, Fedora, etc.) .  I will not provide the instructions here because the project is on beta and there can be breaking changes in the installation process. So, for the installation manual check this link. Don't forget to install and setup a user agent switcher add-on for your browser.

Enjoy!

 

 

p.s. Oh yes, the Fiberizer Cloud hardware acceleration feature doesn’t work on Linux.