Introduction
I attended a great session at MMS (Midwest Management Summit) in San Diego by Jan, Sandy and Simon, it was about using the power of AI to assist with automating the diagnosis of Windows Autopilot enrollment amongst other things. A very interesting session which I tweeted about below.
While their session was progressing, I was busy using my ZorinOS based laptop, a modern day Lenovo ThinkPad X9, and from there via the Brave web browser I was using my personal Windows 365 Cloud PC, which had Visual Studio Code and Github Copilot (Max) installed.
So what was I doing?
Prior to the session, I was showing my colleagues how great I thought ZorinOS was and one of them mentioned this…
…but is it managed by Intune?
It wasn’t.
Getting Linux machines into Intune
Microsoft does helpfully provide an installer.sh script to enroll supported Linux distributions, namely Ubuntu and Redhat. But the script fails as soon as you try to run it on ZorinOS even though ZorinOS is based on Ubuntu.
Error: zorin is not a supported distribution. Supported: Ubuntu 22.o4/24.04/26.04, RHEL/AlmaLinux 8/9/10
My first thought was to use Copilot chat to fix the 397 line installer.sh script to work with ZorinOS. Below is just a snippet from that long chat.
It gave lots of advice and wanted me to do the edits, which I did, but after each edit the script was failing with new errors and that wasn’t working very well. To be honest I didn’t have the patience to do a lot of back and forth with Copilot to get the script to work, and yes I did try.
…after each edit the script was failing with new errors
It was at this point that I joined the aforementioned session above, and saw Jan/Simon/Sandy doing cool things with Visual Studio Code + Github Copilot. If you get a chance to see these guys in action I highly recommend that you do!
With that inspiration I flipped Github Copilot to use the Claude Sonnet 5.5 model, and asked it to go out and download the Microsoft installer.sh script, and to rewrite it to work with ZorinOS.
I then ran the script provided by Github Copilot on my X9 and it worked, first time, no errors, it just worked!
The new script is called zorin-intune-installer.sh and is available on my Github here.
Below you can see what the output looks like on another laptop, my ThinkPad T570. Again, no errors!
Next I asked Github Copilot to upload the completed script to my Github along with a readme explaining how to use it.
Before their session ended my X9 running ZorinOS was managed by Intune. I was literally buzzing with excitement.
In the below screenshot you can see my X9 is managed by Intune and Compliant.
If you want more details about how to use the Microsoft Intune app in Linux to get enrolled into Intune look no further than this great blog by here. Interestingly he also mentions ZorinOS.
Of course, after mine enrolled into Intune it was initially non-compliant and I had to create one or two compliance policies to shim it so that it became compliant.
More info
- https://microsoft.github.io/shell-intune-samples/
- https://github.com/microsoft/shell-intune-samples/tree/master/Linux/Intune%20Installer
- https://github.com/NCBrady/ZorinOS-linux
Summary
Unfortunately it’s not perfect as again, ZorinOS is not supported by Microsoft for Microsoft Intune (yet ?), so when editing compliance policies based on say distro, you are only presented with two choices, Ubuntu or Redhat, why no custom option?
I do hope that through time, that more and more people will ask Microsoft to support it so that management via Intune becomes a no brainer. I can’t say it often enough ZorinOS is awesome and being able to manage it somewhat via Intune is just the icing on the cake.
