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Even after Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella proclaimed Microsoft loved Linux and Microsoft released a specialized Linux for switches, Azure Cloud Switch, many don't buy that Microsoft believes in Linux. What will it take? Maybe, it will be this: Microsoft has selected Ubuntu for its first Linux-based software-as-a service offering, HDInsight, Microsoft's big data Hadoop-on-Azure service. Windows and Ubuntu working together.Microsoft has partnered with Canonical, Ubuntu's parent company, and Hortonworks, a major developer of the Hadoop program. Hadoop enables distributed processing of big data over commodity server clusters and clouds. Together the three companies have made it possible to run HDInsight...

When we released Raspberry Pi 2 in February this year, we announced that Microsoft’s Windows 10 IoT Core, a version of Windows 10 for small Internet-of-Things devices that may or may not have a screen, would be available for the device. Since the Windows Insider release of Windows 10 Core in August, we’ve found that lots of people looking for a Pi 2 are arriving at sellers’ websites from sites catering for Windows developers. Many Windows developers are coming to Raspberry Pi for the first time; we couldn’t be more pleased to welcome them, and we hope they’ll encounter much...

Microsoft will later this year release its open-source friendly lake for big-data analytics in the cloud. Azure Data Lake Store – announced at Build in April – will be released as a preview, Microsoft said Monday. The store will be built on Apache YARN for developers and data scientists, to analyse information, and will use Azure HDInsight – a managed service for Hadoop, Spark, Storm and Hbase. HDInsight was developed by Microsoft working with Ubuntu-shop Canonical and Hadoop spinner Hortonworks, Microsoft and Canonical said. In preparation for the preview Microsoft Monday threw the doors open on managed Linux clusters. Microsoft’s...

Hell must be getting chilly. Microsoft is no longer just supporting Linux as Hyper-V virtual machines (VM) and Azure clouds, the Redmond giant is producing its very own Linux "distribution" -- Azure Cloud Switch (ACS) . Notice the quotes around distribution. Microsoft has not created its own server or desktop distribution. Indeed, you can't buy, lease, or download ACS. This way Microsoft gets to offer Linux-based services while staying on the right side of Linux's GNU General Public License, version 2 (GPLv2) legal requirements. Linux's GPLv2 requires that the code be made freely available only if you're actually shipping your...

Today marks a huge milestone for Steam on Linux: 1,500 games are natively available! This is quite significant while Windows is at 6,464 and OS X is at 2,323.New games continue to be ported to Linux and offered via Steam almost daily. This is all while the Steam Linux market-share is below 1%. Heck, even stats well outside the gaming space show Linux desktop use at less than 2%.While the Linux gaming marketshare right now is very tiny, game developers continue porting to Linux in anticipation of a return on investment down the road as more gamers try out SteamOS...

This week, Microsoft unveiled Azure Cloud Switch, a boring-sounding product that's only interesting to developers and IT professionals working on the bleeding edge of networking technology. The scandalous part is actually under the hood: Azure Cloud Switch is, at the core, a specialized version of Linux — a free operating system that former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer once referred to as "a cancer." Linux, created in the early 1990s by incredibly influential programming firebrand Linus Torvalds and further developed by a veritable army of volunteers from around the world, never quite toppled the dominance of Microsoft Windows on the desktop....

Redmond reveals Azure Cloud Switch, its in-house software-defined networking OS Sitting down? Nothing in your mouth? Microsoft has developed its own Linux distribution. And Azure runs it to do networking. Redmond's revealed that it's built something called Azure Cloud Switch (ACS), describing it as “a cross-platform modular operating system for data center networking built on Linux” and “our foray into building our own software for running network devices like switches.” Kamala Subramanian, Redmond's principal architect for Azure Networking, writes that: “At Microsoft, we believe there are many excellent switch hardware platforms available on the market, with healthy competition between many...

Linux is a great operating system. Nobody in the Linux camp will argue about that. There are many articles on the Internet convincing you to try and to switch to Linux. There are also many articles that attempt to show you why you should not switch. Let's look at this question from a slightly different viewpoint today. Say, you are now convinced that you want to switch to Linux. What you should NOT expect from this switch? 1. Linux works much faster than Windows This isn't too far from the truth. Generally speaking, Linux OS is less resource-hungry than Windows....

I enjoy using Linux on the desktop. Not because of software politics or because I despise other operating systems. I simply like Linux because it just works.It's been my experience that not everyone is cut out for the Linux lifestyle. In this article, I'll help you run through the pros and cons of making the switch to Linux so you can determine if switching is right for you.When to make the switch Switching to Linux makes sense when there is a decisive reason to do so. The same can be said about moving from Windows to OS X or vice...

Linux is a very functional operating system. It "led to the collapse of the infrastructure decision debates of many IT shops," said Guy Smith, chief strategist for Silicon Strategies Marketing. "Before Linux, long-term choices concerning the OS, database, development language, and more divided IT shops -- and the resulting incompatibilities led to dysfunctional applications."    Happy Birthday, Linux Project -- this week you turned 24.The Linux OS has grown up everywhere. Its code and the open source model are found worldwide. People often use linux without knowing it -- when they search on Google, buy metro tickets or surf the Web....

You can try to turn Windows 10's data-sharing ways off, but, bad news: Windows 10 will keep sharing some of your data with Microsoft anyway. There is an alternative: Desktop Linux.You can do a lot to keep Windows 10 from blabbing, but you can't always stop it from talking. Cortana, Windows 10's voice activated assistant, for example, will share some data with Microsoft, even when it's disabled. That data includes a persistent computer ID to identify your PC to Microsoft.If you do use Cortana, you'll be sharing your keystrokes and voice with Microsoft. That's to make Cortana and other Microsoft...

I think we can now all agree: Microsoft Microsoft’s hardline policy on Windows 10’s forced updates is silly. Very silly. Since launching nine days ago Windows Update has sent out an unstable graphics driver which switched off monitors, a buggy security patch which corrupted Windows Explorer and there are now a number of reports that a third update is causing Window 10 machines to crash over and over again…The patch in question is KB3081424 (ironically enough a roll-up of bug fixes) and during its update process affected users find it fails and triggers the message: “We couldn’t complete the updates, undoing...

From the moment an account is created, Microsoft begins watching. The company saves customers' basic information - name, contact details, passwords, demographic data and credit card specifics - but it also digs a bit deeper... and finding answers is not easy, as one privacy expert exclaimed, "there is no world in which 45 pages of policy documents and opt-out settings split across 13 different Settings screens and an external website constitutes 'real transparency'."

Microsoft today refreshed its Windows support lifecycle fact sheet to include Windows 10, saying there that it would provide updates to the new OS for 10 years, or until October 2025. The new information puts to rest one of the biggest remaining questions about Windows 10: what has Microsoft meant since January by describing the policy as running for the supported lifetime of the device when it described the operating system's support timeline? "The traditional 10-year support lifecycle applies to all SKUs [stock-keeping units]," a Microsoft spokeswoman confirmed in a follow-up email [emphasis added]. SKUs represent the various editions of...

On July 21 at OSCon, Google announced that Kubernetes, its open source container deployment and management tool, was ready for the big time -- general use in production environments -- by releasing Kubernetes 1.0. Google wants Kubernetes to be in every one's cloud, and with the 1.0 release it's already well on its way. Chances are many of you don't know Kubernetes, but the odds are even greater that you use it every day. That's because every time you run a Google program -- Search, Gmail, Google Docs, whatever -- you are running it in Google's own container technology, lmctfy...

Every once in a while, I find myself in a situation where I'm being asked by someone who wants to migrate from a Microsoft Windows operating system if Linux is indeed a new home for Windows refugees.Migrating from an operating system to a different one is not for everyone, no matter if you're switching from Windows to Linux, or from Linux to Mac, or from Mac to Windows, as it involves special hardware (in some cases) and a lot of time learning how the new OS works, something that we are short of these days.It just happens that I’ve had...

Microsoft has finally decided to add support for SSH to PowerShell, allowing people to log into Windows systems and use software remotely over an encrypted connection. Users of Linux, the BSDs, and other operating systems, will know all about OpenSSH and its usefulness in connecting machines in a secure way to execute commands and transfer data. And soon Windows PowerShell – the command-line shell and scripting language – can be used over SSH, we're told. "The PowerShell team [will] adopt an industry-proven solution while providing tight integration with Windows; a solution that Microsoft will deliver in Windows while working closely...

I might be wrong, but I get the impression that my Windows friends — which would be most of the people I see on a daily basis — think of Linux as this incredibly geeky system from another planet. I think most of them don’t understand why I use it and why I don’t just stay in the known world — which to them would be Windows. Paradoxically, however, they do get why some folks use Macs.Quite simply, most of us use desktop Linux because it’s superior to all other brands, including Windows and OS X — even including Unix...

In yet another sign that Microsoft is a very different animal these days, the company has released PowerShell DSC (desired state configuration) for Linux. PowerShell DSC is a server configuration tool that has hitherto driven Windows Server boxen. But Microsoft's now decided it has a “commitment to common management of heterogeneous assets in your datacenter or the public cloud”, so has added Linux-wrangling features to the tool. The new code can cope with CentOS, Debian GNU/Linux, Oracle Linux, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, and Ubuntu Server. Once you get it up and running you can enjoy the...

With the sizes slimming down, it is certainly not a huge surprise that we have a Chip sized computer amidst us. What is really astonishing is the fact that this chip sized computer costs only $9 and can do literally everything for you. The Chip as it has been named runs on Linux and includes Wi-Fi and Bluetooth as well.In fact, CHIP from Next Thing Co. also offers a VGA or an HDMI post for monitors, adding immense versatility to it. To be true, this is certainly one invention that all of us might just have been looking forward to.CHIP has...