Microsoft's CBL-Delridge is 404, long live CBL-Mariner
Microsoft is increasingly standardizing on its in-house CBL-Mariner Linux distribution. Is this Microsoft Linux?
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CBL-Delridge, Microsoft's Debian-based Linux distribution, is no more. As pointed out to me by Mary Jo Foley, the CBL-Delridge apt package repository, is now 404:
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I had previously written a guide to building your own image of CBL-Delridge from that repository:
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I am afraid that method will no longer work.
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Mary Jo Foley also wrote about CBL-Delridge:
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The only external use of CBL-Delridge by Microsoft, to my knowledge, was in Azure Cloud Shell, the shell built into Azure's web portal interface and Windows Terminal:
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But you will notice if you login to Azure Cloud Shell now, another Linux distro is powering ACS, Microsoft's CBL-Mariner:
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CBL is short for "Common Base Linux", which originally appeared to apply to a whole family of Linux distros within Microsoft, but Microsoft appears to be increasingly consolidating efforts about CBL-Mariner.
Microsoft describes CBL-Mariner as "an internal Linux distribution for Microsoft’s cloud infrastructure and edge products and services" but it now powers such diverse offerings as:
- Azure Cloud Shell
- Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)
- The lightweight layer that runs above your distro of choice on Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL)
Unlike Debian and thus .deb-based CBL-Delridge, CBL-Mariner is .rpm-based, with .spec files borrowed from VMware's Photon OS, openmamba, and the Fedora Project. The project also acknowledges Linux from Scratch, so despite being .rpm-based, CBL-Mariner is not a derivative of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Fedora, or SUSE Linux. It is something new.
Also unlike CBL-Delridge, Microsoft makes installable .ISO images available for CBL-Mariner.
The GUI installer on the ISO is quite fast. A full installation on a VM with just 4GB of RAM took 64 seconds.
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And CBL-Mariner is proud of its install speed too:
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You can browse the packages available in CBL-Mariner's default repository. While there is no official GUI desktop, there are some interesting GNOME packages landing in the repository:
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Development on CBL-Mariner is quite active, with 223 releases to date on both the 1.0 and 2.0 release branches:
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CBL-Mariner even provides detailed instructions on how it is built:
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You can learn more from CBL-Mariner's GitHub page:
Or Microsoft's official documentation for CBL-Mariner:
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So, the question is, is CBL-Mariner going to be Microsoft Linux?
Kelsey works on the WSL 2 kernel, Jim oversees CBL Mariner, and Rachel works on CBL Mariner. https://t.co/DDVqXp9azD
— Hayden Barnes (@unixterminal) October 13, 2022