It’s been a good few months for me and Linux. One by one, all the reasons that I’ve kept a Windows partition around have disappeared. Football Manager now runs on Linux, the Zune HD can be synced in Linux, and now Sky Go can be used under Linux too.
Sky Go uses Silverlight, which has had a Linux implementation before now in Moonlight, but it didn’t support the DRM that Sky uses. However, a new project called Pipelight supports DRM and works like a charm.
To install Pipelight in Ubuntu, first add the required PPA
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:pipelight/stable
sudo apt-get update
Now install Pipelight
sudo apt-get install pipelight-multi
You’ll have to agree to some EULAs and the like, but it should install fine.
Now, for Sky Go to work, you need to enable Silverlight 5.0, instead of the latest version, 5.1. To do this, run
sudo pipelight-plugin --enable silverlight5.0
Now, restart your browser, I recommend Firefox, on my machine it wouldn’t work under Chrome. I’ve been very impressed by the reliability and quality of the video, so time to delete that Windows partition for once and for all I reckon.