os platforms
Fedora-derived server distro is ready for local testing, but production deployments should wait
Microsoft's Fedora-derived Azure Linux 4 has hit a new milestone: you can now run it outside of Azure. The project's GitHub page now offers ISO file downloads in addition to its Azure Marketplace page.We covered the Azure Linux 4 announcement in May, and it is still in preview. You should not deploy this in production just yet. The availability of ISO files for installation in a local VM is a welcome step forward, though. They are not where you might expect to find them for a FOSS project on GitHub, under Releases – there are just some kernel builds there. You need to scroll down to the section headed Using Azure Linux and then expand the section headed ISO Installer. Both x86-64 and Arm64 images are available.Azure Linux 4 is the successor to the older Microsoft CBL-Mariner distro we looked at in 2022, which in 2024 transformed into Azure Linux 3. Now, configuration is mostly in TOML files, while older releases used .spec files inherited from VMware Photon OS, which was mentioned on The Register a decade ago.
This build, which reports its name as "Four Beta," uses kernel 6.18 and systemd 258.4. It derives most of its package sources and packaging metadata from Fedora, but that does not mean this is a rebadged edition of Fedora Server, and you should not expect it to be compatible with Fedora packages. Only two repositories are configured by default: azurelinux-base and azurelinux-microsoft, both on packages.microsoft.com/azurelinux/. There isn't a great deal in them yet, or in the distro itself: for instance, we were surprised to find the less command missing, and htop was not available to install.
