Microsoft has been pushing the Silverlight API at a blistering pace. It seems like only yesterday we were building SL 2.0 applications.  SL 3.0 came and vanished with the blink of an eye, as 4.0 is upon us. 

One aspect of Silverlight which makes developers quite pleased is that it does run just fine under Mac OS X, which certainly helps increase the market use. However, as far as Microsoft is concerned, Linux users are out of luck.

Thankfully, the Mono team has developed (and is developing) an open source alternative to Silverlight called Moonlight. This API is compatible with Microsoft Silverlight 2.0, and allows developers to build and deploy their Silverlight enabled web pages to Linux machines (provided the user has installed the Moonlight runtime).

The final release of Moonlight 2.0 supports Deep Zoom, and all features of SL 2.0

Moonlight 3.0 and Moonlight 4.0 (which support the feature set of Silverlight 3.0 and 4.0) are currently in development.  

Also, the MonoDevelop IDE (which runs under Windows, Mac and Linux) provides various Moonlight templates. 

So the short answer is Silverlight does run on Linux, with a little help from the fine folks at the Mono project. 

Happy coding.