Linus Torvalds might release new a Linux

The world almost certainly needs to wait another week for Linux 4.9, says the operating system's overlord Linus Torvalds.

In his weekly post on the progress of the next kernel release, Torvalds announced release candidate seven of Linux 4.9, saying “ I think we got all the silly problems I was aware of fixed, and on the whole things are looking pretty good.”

So good that “ if next week ends up being very quiet, this _might_ be the last rc, although honestly I strongly suspect I'll end up doing an rc8.”

“It's been a big release, and rc7 could have been quieter. We'll see.”

This week's release adds “mostly networking and architecture updates, with a smattering of other driver updates”.

If you test them, do it quietly.

Source....

SQL Server on Linux

First Look Microsoft has released a public preview of SQL Server for Linux, and I took it for a spin.

There are three supported platforms for SQL Server on Linux, these being Red Hat Enterprise 7.2, Ubuntu 16.04, and a Linux-based Docker engine. Installation on other versions of Linux may also work, although unsupported. The Docker image enables installation on Mac or Windows. Microsoft specifies a minimum of 3.25GB of RAM.

I installed on a modest 8GB dual-processor VM running Ubuntu 16.04 "Xenial" for testing. Setup involves agreeing a licence and setting an SA (system administrator) password. I then installed command-line tools, sqlcmd (execute SQL queries) and bcp (bulk copy). The install script prompts you to enable automatic start-up.