Microsoft and Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, have announced native .NET availability in Ubuntu 22.04. While open-source .NET has long been available in Ubuntu and other Linux distributions, this collaboration by Microsoft and Canonical will better secure the .NET software supply chain with enterprise-grade support.
Specifically, .NET 6 developers can install the .NET 6 packages on Ubuntu with a single, simple command:
#sudo apt install dotnet6
That’s all there is to it.
Canonical has also released tiny new Open Container Initiative (OCI) .NET 6 LTS and ASP.NET compliant appliance images. These “Chiseled Ubuntu Containers” images come without a shell, package manager, or anything that’s not needed, making them more secure out of the box.
These chiseled images are about 100MB smaller than their predecessors. Indeed, the smallest image comes in at 12.9MB, with only the .NET runtime dependencies for self-contained .NET applications. Combined, these factors make the Chiseled images ideal for cloud-based containers.
The foundation for these .NET packages is a new Ubuntu .deb package, which Canonical and Microsoft built together. Their goal is to deliver timely security patches and .NET releases to Ubuntu developers. They’ll do this by having Microsoft share Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) security information, including code, with Canonical ahead of public releases. In return, Canonical will share security data with Microsoft before publication.
Canonical will also work in concert with Microsoft’s new distro maintainer .NET group. One of its goals is to secure the software supply chain from source to packages.
This means the two companies will work directly together with no intermediaries. “We now have what’s effectively a zero-distance supply chain for all Canonical assets,” said Richard Lander, Microsoft’s .NET Program Manager, in a press statement.
Canonical and Microsoft are also working together to ensure that new .NET releases are coordinated with new Ubuntu releases. In practice, this means that the .NET LTS, which ships in November of odd years, will be packaged into the Ubuntu LTS in April of the following even year.
These .NET deb packages are now in Ubuntu Jammy Jellyfish 22.04 LTS for the x64 architecture. They will soon be available for the Arm64 architecture and Canonical’s other LTS Ubuntu releases.
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