On the last day of January, Oracle Linux 8.5, the current version of Big Red’s RHEL-alike, quietly appeared on the Windows Store.
It’s packaged to run on the Windows Subsystem for Linux and says it needs Windows 10 version 19041.0 or newer. That’s the much-delayed Windows 10 May 2020 update, also known as 20H1.
This is the first official presence of any member of the greater Red Hat family – although Oracle Linux isn’t directly a Red Hat product, obviously – in Microsoft’s online souk.
In the Windows Store, if you search for Linux, you’ll find Ubuntu, both SUSE and openSUSE, Debian, Kali, Alpine, and Pengwin, which was built for WSL. What you won’t see is Fedora, CentOS, RHEL, or anything like it. There is a so-called Fedora remix, but since it costs money whereas real Fedora is free, we suggest avoiding that.
This isn’t totally unprecedented. It’s possible to install Fedora in WSL2 – but that’s quite a different animal.
WSL2 runs a full Linux kernel in a VM on Microsoft’s Hyper-V hypervisor. The original WSL, on the other hand, is a personality of the Windows kernel, distantly related to the POSIX environment that came with NT 3.1 just under 30 years ago.
Still, it’s an interesting step. WSL has been somewhat sidelined by WSL2: the latter means running a real Linux kernel, which means better compatibility. WSL1, on the other hand, uses fewer resources and integrates better with the rest of the OS. ®
Source link
