openSUSE Comes to Windows 10

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You don’t have to limit yourself to Ubuntu Bash on Windows 10.

Ubuntu is the officially supported version of Linux to run inside Windows, using the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) technology. If you run SUSE Enterprise Linux on Microsoft Azure, you can now easily run openSUSE Leap Bash on Windows to get access to both SUSE and Microsoft enterprise utilities on the same machine, without the overload of a virtual machine.

SUSE/openSUSE engineers have managed to bring openSUSE to Windows 10. Hannes Kühnemund, Sr. Product Manager at SUSE, detailed the process of replacing the Ubuntu Bash shell with openSUSE Leap in Windows 10.

A user needs to be part of the Insider Program with WSL enabled. The procedure detailed by Kühnemund requires the Ubuntu Bash shell to be already installed on the system; it simply replaces it with openSUSE userspace. You can also install SUSE Linux Enterprise, said Kühnemund.

This could be a useful workaround for those developers and sys admins who run Linux on Azure machines, because they can run both Windows and Linux utilities on their systems without the overhead of a virtual machine or dual booting. It’s also useful for those users who want to run Windows 10 but also want the capabilities that Linux utilities have. Want to sync files from your Windows 10 system to your server? Just use rsync  from openSUSE shell. Want to ssh into your server? No need to install PuTTY anymore, you have native ssh support.

In addition to SUSE/openSUSE efforts, an open source project on GitHub allows users to run multiple Linux distributions on their Windows 10 machines.

01/18/2017

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