This post is brought to you by Command Line Heroes, an original podcast from Red Hat.

Part 1 of this post presented an overview of the Red Hat and Microsoft partnership. Part 2 focuses on partnership updates.

The next generation begins…

(Captain’s log. Stardate 94942.42.)

SQL Server on Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Prime directive: “Allow SQL Server to run on Red Hat Enterprise Linux as a bare-metal operating system and to operate on Microsoft Azure, Hyper-V, and Red Hat OpenShift.”

Based on the prior successes of the partnership, in March 2016 Red Hat and Microsoft began exploring the feasibility of making SQL Server available on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Shortly thereafter, an initial private preview was made available (April 2016), followed by a public preview (November 2016) and the launch of the Early Adopter Program (EAP). SQL Server on Red Hat Enterprise Linux was formally added to the partnership in July 2017 and the GA version made available to the public in October 2017.

This post is brought to you by Command Line Heroes, an original podcast from Red Hat.

Captain’s log. Stardate 4513.3.

The crew of the Command Line Heroes podcast asked me to talk about the Red Hat-Microsoft relationship. I can’t help but sense a little irony in the title “Command Line Heroes.” When I started my career in the early 1980s, everyone in our industry was a “command line hero”—as graphical user interfaces (GUIs) were still in the early stages and not yet widely available. At that time, being able to use the vi editor in full screen mode to edit files, or to play Snake and Wumpus on a PDP 11-45 with BSD 4.2, was considered cool. Looking in the rearview mirror, I can’t help but be reminded of Karr’s famous quote “plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose” (the more things change, the more they the stay the same).  

This post is brought to you by Command Line Heroes, an original podcast from Red Hat.

When I was younger

I guess you could call me an “accidental technologist.” Growing up, I never intended to work with computers. When I was younger, I actually only tinkered with PCs at home or at friends’ houses because you had to learn how to edit the config files on DOS to free up enough memory so that games could have 512k memory to run. You had to understand what a device driver was, how to install it, and how to add it to the CONFIG.SYS or AUTOEXEC.BAT files to have a working mouse on the console. I also learned about interrupts, IO addresses, and DMA channels from configuring things like ISA SoundBlaster cards with jumpers and DIP switches. Without meaning to, or even realizing it, I had a pretty decent understanding of personal computers. I was not a programmer, not by a long stretch, but I could get computers working pretty quickly. And I loved automating things in batch files. The power of scripting was clear.

This post is brought to you by Command Line Heroes, an original podcast from Red Hat.

In the summer of my 14th year, I needed a new computer.

Kids today need things all the time, but I really needed a new computer. Why? Because the PC clone I shared with my dad had a 286 processor and Linux® required at least a 386. I tried the Slackware boot disk one of my dad’s colleagues gave me anyway, but the screen would display “LI” and then freeze, two letters shy of the “LILO” it would print when the bootloader was successful.

The kernel just didn’t know what to do with my antiquated processor. I spent a lot of time looking at a frozen screen with nothing but “LI_” on it.