Azure Linux ➹

Azure Linux is Microsoft’s internal Linux distribution for 1st party services (cloud infra, IoT devices, etc.).

Although my disclaimer doesn’t allow me to write much about it, there are a few of my notes that mention things in the public domain that might be hard to figure out in under an hour and that even I keep forgetting.

These notes mostly apply to the core distribution, which is what I always build upon since I have very specific needs.

• Use tdnf, not dnf or yum (which actually don’t ship with it, but that I am constantly trying to use because I forget this all the time)

• You can get docker-compose, moby-engine and even k3s from the base repos. Just don’t forget to enable them after installing them (systemctl enable --now docker is something else I keep forgetting to do)
• 3.0 ships with Python 3.12, Java 21 and Golang 1.25 (which are nice and stable)

• A blank VM uses 120MB of RAM (including buffers), which is quite nice
• bash is the default, but you can install zsh
• The default locale is C.UTF-8, with a UTC timezone
• curl, arping, arptables, ebtables/ip6tables, lvm and ionice are installed, which is… nice
• Besides the usual virtualization guest tools you get a few creature comforts
• There is no avahi-daemon in the default repos (I’ve needed it often for my local setups but haven’t yet had the time to track down what I can do about it)
• There is no less, but more is there for you since the dawn of UNIX