Among the countless announcements in the Intel Developer Forum regarding Moblin was a joint press release from Intel and Microsoft. In it is announced that Microsoft wants to port Silverlight to Moblin.

Intel and Microsoft have announced a new port of Silverlight to Linux, specifically for the Intel-sponsored Moblin operating system running on Atom-powered devices such as netbooks. The port enables Intel to include Silverlight as a supported runtime in the Atom Developer Program, which will feed an iPhone-like App Store.

When I first looked at Moonlight, Novell’s open-source version of Microsoft’s Sliverlight, I liked it, but I didn’t really see much of a point to it. Silverlight, Microsoft’s latest answer to Adobe Flash, isn’t used in many sites. What I liked the most about Silverlight was that it provided a fully legal way to access WMV and WMA (Windows Media Video and Audio) from Linux.

There have been quite a few Moblin related announcements these last weeks: The release of the final version of Moblin 2.0, the Moblin Garage and the preview release of Moblin 2.1. More interesting is the news released by Microsoft's Silverlight team that they will develop Silverlight 3 for Moblin.

Intel hosted their developer conference this week in San Francisco (Intel Developer Forum) where several new announcements were made, with Linux being involved in some of these announcements. It was revealed that Dell will begin shipping Ubuntu Moblin Netbook Remix on one of their Atom-powered netbooks, Moblin 2.0 was released, and there was a snapshot of Moblin 2.1 was released.

The prominent role of Silverlight in the Intel-Microsoft collaboration leads to a new set of questions

The first netbook preinstalled with Moblin v2 for Netbooks will likely launch next week, possibly at Intel's Developer Forum (IDF) in San Francisco. Following that, the Moblin Project will release the first milestone release of the Moblin v2 Linux distribution, which began beta testing in May.

There's three important announcements coming out of Intel's Developer Forum today as it relates to their Moblin Linux distribution that launched two years ago: Moblin 2.0 final has been released, Moblin 2.1 is under development, and Moblin Garage and the Moblin Application Installer have been introduced.

Novell announced it is developing a Moblin-based version of SUSE Linux that is optimized for Intel Atom-based netbooks. In addition, Intel and Novell today announced a partnership to collaborate and encourage original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and original design manufacturers (ODMs) to adopt the Linux-based Moblin distribution.