Supported Linux distributions

When this book was written, SQL Server on Linux supported all major distributions:

• Commercial: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.3 Workstation, Server, and Desktop
• Commercial: SUSE Enterprise Linux Server v12 SP2
• Free: Ubuntu 16.04 LTS and 16.10

Red Hat Enterprise Linux and SUSE Enterprise Linux are commercial versions of popular open source and free distributions. So, this list can be easily expanded to include the following distributions:

• openSUSE Leap/Tumbleweed
• Fedora

The two are not officially listed in the documentation but they work just fine, the same as the commercial versions. If you don't have any Linux experience whatsoever, I recommend Ubuntu or openSUSE. These two distributions will be covered in this chapter, specifically how to install them and prepare for SQL Server installation.