Silverlight on Ubuntu Linux with Moonlight

I was very curious on the Linux Silverlight port called Moonlight, because VirtualEarth3D runs with Silverlight.
When you access a Silverlight enabled page via Firefox on a Linux machine you get forwarded here to download a firefox plugin.
Unfortunately it depends on many other libs to run. So at first it naturally didn't run for me, because it is just not mentioned on the referred page. And also not on the Moonlight project pages. So I searched the web. I found some "older" posts on building a firefox-plugin from moonlight source. There I discovered, that you need some codec libs on your machine and of course mono.
With the additional installation of the following packages it works on my (Intrepid) Ubuntu machine:


sudo apt-get install ffmpeg libavutil libavcodec mono-mcs


The second mistake I did, was to think that this Moonlight will run VirtualEarth3D.
Because I found this blog entry.
It looks like, that it is supporting the 3D view from VE. But I thikn, what you see is just a customized 2D VirtualEarth application. :(
And I think, that this is due to a lack of Silvertlight 2.x support.
But to see that there are at least some Silverlight enabled websites which run now on Linux go here:
http://go-mono.com/moonlight/MoonlightStatus.aspx

According to the projects roadmap there will be Moonlight2.0 alpha available from march 18th. I hope with the implemetaion of Silverlight 2.0 MS-PL in Moonlight2.0, will allow VirtualEarth3D to run on linux machines.

And that would be really great news!