When you first learn about IBM LinuxONE, many of the resources talk about security, resiliency, and sustainability. These benefits have been covered extensively. But on a practical level, what does LinuxONE actually run?
The officially supported enterprise Linux distributions are:
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)
- SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES)
- Ubuntu
Beyond these three, there are nearly a dozen community-driven distributions that have support for LinuxONE. Several of these community distributions serve as an "upstream" for the enterprise distributions, for instance, the Fedora Project provides the latest versions of packages and are usually released there before they make their way into a Red Hat Enterprise Linux release.
The Linux distributions, and the respective companies supporting the enterprise versions, test, build and support thousands of open source applications for LinuxONE. That means when you install one of these Linux distributions, you're already getting a lot of software! The Open Mainframe Project Software Discovery Tool maintains a searchable database of packages across a number of distributions and can be accessed at sdt.openmainframeproject.org. Beyond what is included with the distributions, individual open source projects may have releases for the architecture (referred to as "s390x"), and you may find container images on the popular image repositories. Learn more about searching for open source software available for LinuxONE in the article Searching for Open Source Software on IBM Z under the section "For Linux on IBM Z and LinuxONE."
All of this leads to a vast array of open source software that runs on IBM LinuxONE today. But for a quick taste of what you can run on IBM LinuxONE, our teams have prepared a slide that we like to share of major projects that work, either out of the box (most things just run fine!) or through efforts of partners, clients, and organizations in the open source community:
Once you've decided to move forward with installing Linux and your chosen suite of open source software, you have to make some decisions based on your environment. You can run Linux directly on a Logical Partition (LPAR) from the Processor Resource/System Manager (PR/SM), but more commonly you'd run it on IBM z/VM or KVM (yes, that KVM, so it works with libvirt!). From there, you'll need some information about your network and storage configuration to configure your environment. The figure below demonstrates some of the configurations available.
And you're off! There are certainly things that are special about LinuxONE that are worth learning about though. If you're already familiar with Linux, I recommend taking the free Linux on LinuxONE course to get a strong overview of features and differences you may discover as you begin working with LinuxONE, plus the instructor, Jeff Bisti, is funny and engaging so it's a real pleasure to go through. But on a whole, Linux is Linux, and day to day use and tasks will be identical to what you’ve used in any past Linux deployments you've managed.
To learn more, the following are from my bookmarks that I like to have on-hand when talking about LinuxONE software environments: