Microsoft's Azure now supports Linux...Sort of..

Microsoft has announced that it wil now support Linux.  Well if you are running a few distros they will.  Those would be:

Suse Linux Enterprise Server 11 SP2

OpenSuse 12.01

CentOS 6.2

Ubuntu 12.04

If you didn't notice there is one very large distorbution missing from that list.  Red Hat and Fedora are not there but CentOS is.  CentOS is a dirivitive work off of Red Hat.  So it's not likely a driver issue.  It's more likely that it's a licensing and support contract thing.  We have another story about a contract they just signed so we know it's also unlikely that they aren't happy about working with each other.  Check out the podcast to hear us go into more detail about our thoughts on the whole situation.

What's in a name?

Andreas Jaeger Program Manager for openSuSE at Novell and the team he works with think that maybe it's time for a change.  They have come up with a list of eight variants on the numbering part of their naming for future releases.  They want people's input so here is your chance.  The possiblity of going Octal left me with a smile on my face.  In reality they should probably adopt a date driven versioning like Ubuntu, Mandriva and Fedora.  Check out the post and the explanations of how they came up with the list.  Then let them know what you think.

Episode 41 - Vegas and the News...

Running Time:  0:44:00

1) Introduction

    Thanks for reading the article and listening to the interview with Luke from Puppet Labs

    Brian’s going to be speaking at the IBM Impact Conference about WebSphere Automation

    Has Nokia lost their mind and abandon the Open Source Community

2) News

    IBM’s Watson Rules the Jeopardy Board

    One Application Installer to Rule them All

    DNS Security?

3) Conclusion

    Recommendations for People to interview

    E-Mail us at podcast@linuxinstall.net

    Go to the WebSite to call us via Google Voice

    Facebook Fan Page

    Follow us on Twitter and Identica as @linuxinstall

    Look for us and comment on iTunes, odeo

Fedora and OpenSuse drop dev efforts on Unity....

Thanks to the folks over at ostastic.com for pointing me to the posts from the developers working on Unity on Fedora and OpenSuse.  Both site problems with the upstream developers and seem to be suffering from burn-out.  If you know anyone interested in picking the projects up they both seem willing to turn it over.  The current decision though puts Ubuntu out on their own in adopting Unity.  If you want to test it out you seem to have to use Ubuntu for now.

Application Installers Unite.....

According to this article we found, meetings are starting to happen and people are trying to move towards a common Application Installer. So their could be the end of the "My package manager is better than yours is" debates?  Well it's a bit early to tell but it does sound like the big distros are talking about settling on a common package format.  If they do go forward with this we can only hope that it's adoption moves faster than LSB(Linux Standards Base).  It would definitely go a long way to help adoption of Linux as a platform.  For instance, only seeing one line on download pages like Windows and Mac have would help newbies or people thinking about trying linux be less afraid.  When you can create app stores that only have to carry one type of package they become a lot easier to create.  We here at linuxinstall.net hope that every linux install will get easier over time.

What do you think?  What problems will one package format have?  What hidden benefits are there?  What hidden problems?