Installing Silverlight on Mint 18.1:

Just as I had finished the first edit of this article, Mozilla decided to throw a spanner in the works by announcing the from Firefox 53 onwards, they won't be supporting silverlight. Oh well, I may have found a new browser for linux which will at least give me some extra time with Silverlight.

A few months ago, my ISP decided to add some sports channels to my broadband package, the only downfall is: I need to use the silverlight plugin. This is a piece of software designed by Microsoft. The downside for me is I use Linux Mint as my operating system and Silverlight isn't designed for my operating system. It made accessing these channels difficult, but I've finally managed to do so. I use Mint 18.1 mate edition. This should also work on Ubuntu as well as versions of Mint based on Ubuntu. Chrome no longer supports silverlight and Firefox will abandon silverlight support from version 53 onwards. I suggest using the Palemoon browser for the moment in Linux as it's based on earlier versions of firefox.

Firstly, let's get Palemoon installed. If you have Ubuntu or Mint installed, head to this site and follow the instructions to install the Palemoon repositories and browser for your version of Ubuntu or Mint.

In order to install silverlight on Mint, close Palemoon, open up terminal and type the following commands:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:pipelight/stable
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install --install-recommends pipelight-multi
sudo pipelight-plugin --update
pipelight-plugin --enable silverlight
sudo pipelight-plugin --create-mozilla-plugins

To ensure silverlight is installed on your system, open up palemoon and type "about:plugins" into the address bar. This command will show the plugins you have installed for palemoon. If you see the follwing, you have the Silverlight plugin installed: