Anyone looked into almalinux? I was sort of waiting for rocky, but I see from over the weekend on slashdot that almalinux stable is released.
mark
19 thoughts on - Almalinux?
Hi Mark,
yup.
So far I upgraded a couple of test machines using the conversion tool they provided on GitHub (works fine, although it seems each and every package will be re-downloaded during the migration process which makes it a bit tedious), and I used my own KVM/virt-install/Kickstart/Ansible-Workflow to bring up one new server from scractch with no further change than swapping the ISO image for CentOS against the one for Alma 8.3.
Both procedures worked absolutely flawless, and so far I still have to find the first issue with any of the machines converted to or initially set up with AlmaLinux.
Caveat:
1. All of the machines I tried are VMs, no bare metal servers or VM hosts.
2. All of the machines are headless with no GUI installed at all.
3. No UEFI or Secure Boot (the latter is an open issue with Alma AFAIK).
On the other hand I did not need to change a single bit of Ansible code or Kickstart template in order to make it work, so the compatibility to CentOS seems to be very good.
Regards,
Peter.
wasn’t it present under cloudlinux name with modifications compared to the original RHEL/CentOS?
Also maintained by business unit, which might impact later changes when you tight your prod to it. in that case looks like Rgular CentOS8-stream would seem better idea with local package copy/snapshot….
—
Ruslanas Gžibovskis
+370 6030 7030
I’ve cross-graded two C8 VMs over to AL8 and thus far smooth operation.
+1
I did my estimate of what will last, so I don’t have to jump my infrastructure through hoops and loops again soon, so my decision:
1. Debian
2. on machines that will require cuda: Ubuntu (Debian clone which will support NVIDIA proprietary stuff)
3. FreeBSD (all servers: jails on FreeBSD)
This decision will let me to not make fundamental changes soon. Not guaranteed, but I have good record of such decisions made by me in the past.
I hope, this helps somebody.
Valeri
). Do note the release notes specifically
—
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Valeri Galtsev Sr System Administrator Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics University of Chicago Phone: 773-702-4247
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
We are moving it into production as we speak!
Todd Merriman Software Toolz, Inc.
I hoped they would join forces and produce only one RHEL clone but put some effort into bringing EPEL to a usable state for EL8 instead. IMHO
that would help *MUCH* more than to have two almost identical rebuilds of RHEL.
Simon
Hi Simon,
+1
I expect that to happen sooner or later. Currently Alma has a head start with Rocky postponed until the end of April, but to me the race is still open.
As is the case with many other colleagues, I’m currently stuck with RHEL clones because RHEL/CentOS is what my customers are using and they are not going to switch to Debian/FreeBSD/Ubuntu/whatever any time soon for a plethora of reasons. So it would be nice to have a one-stop-solution instead of having to decide which of the clones will be the more future-proof option.
Regards,
Peter.
A major part of the announcement videocast was about the formation of the 501c6 non-profit foundation that will back the distro. While it does indeed appear that everyone *currently* working on it works for CloudLinux it was also clear that their longer-term intention is to have the Alma Foundation be completely independent.
Yeah, I know, I shouldn’t be promoting the “other team,” but I don’t see them that way, and I would not want this list to be a source of any misinformation about them.
I installed the beta when it came out on a VM running under C7. I
upgrade every day or two and Alma upgrades have so far been seamless. It’s transited from beta to RC and now to stable.
I installed the RC on a USB stick to allow me to run as bare metal on a laptop (which unfortunately has to remain as Win10). It ran fine until the upgrade to stable, but then corrupted the image during the upgrade. I reinstalled and it seems to be running fine.
I’ve been trialing Springdale as well (as a VM).
Requirements are:
OwnCloud DokuWiki Zotero DNS slave, eventual master DHCP server NFS server Thunderbird Firefox KeePass OpenOffice FreeCAD
Octave Lilypond and Frescobaldi Compilers: GNU and others. I’ll probably think of a few users as I work through them!
There used to be several RHEL clones too, but many (some??) have dropped by the wayside. I started with TaoLinux, a rebuild of EL6, by basically one guy at a university, because he wanted his own RHEL clone to run at work. when he changed jobs he worked with Johnny to come up with a transition for Taolinux users to turn their systems into CentOS systems. As I understand it, also, Scientific Linux has quit and urges its users to go to CentOS (or did, before the big hullabaloo in the CentOS world). there was also Whitebox LInux, but I don’t know what ever became of it.
So, hopefully those doing rebuilds of 8 will also eventually coalesce into a smaller number, hopefully 1.
Fred
No one has said it, but everyone that’s tried it – what’s it at? I’m on CentOS 7. Do I have to go to 8 for Alma? Is there a 7? Is the conversion script someone mentioned for same release, or upgrade, or…?
mark
They will not be doing a 7. Just 8.
That said … it’s probably a great idea to take this conversation over to *their* mailing lists. There’s an extent to which this conversation is relevant to this list – after all, we’re all part of the same extended family now – but once it starts becoming a technical discussion of Alma itself, it’s veering off-topic, and you’ll get better answers over there.
–Rich (With community manager hat on, trying to avoid this thread getting out of hand. No, it’s not yet. Just trying to avoid it.)
Looking. Rocky was supposed to release something at the beginning of the month, but I haven’t seen anything.
-Frank
—–Original Message—
The release was postponed by one month.
“Unfortunately we’ve had to revise our previous update for a release candidate from March 31 to April 30, due to complications in the build efforts. We continue to make steady progress, and are optimistic about our revised timeline.”
mark, CentOS 7 will be fully supported till EOL, so why waste time on AL7?
I would not convert CL7 to any 8 but if that is only reason you are asking about AL7 then your best bet is to convert CL7 to last CL8 (not CS8) and then convert CL8 to AL8.
—
Ljubomir Ljubojevic
(Love is in the Air)
PL Computers Serbia, Europe
StarOS, Mikrotik and CentOS/RHEL/Linux consultant
Rich .. I agree .. I don’t see Igor and company as the other team either.
I wished the almalinux team well on their launch day on reddit. This is because I know many of the people involved in CloudLinux and I have met them plenty of times at cPanel conferences and other places. I trust Igor and his team.
I personally feel that CentOS Stream is a great distro and once you guys actually see it in practice with all the engineering effort and community involvement working as envisioned, you will like it and it will meet your needs.
In my post I said as much about CentOS Stream .. but also IF you still want to do a downstream and not slightly upstream build of EL source code, I definitely would look at AlmaLinux.
My ultimate goal is to make CentOS Stream the most used community distribution in the world .. but, in doing that there is no need to be negative toward AlmaLinux.
Thanks, Johnny Hughes
+1 agree, thanks for the additional information and staying positive in regards to other alternatives.
Thanks Rich for the kind words and Johnny for the support as well. Rich is correct about the non-profit foundation that was setup to facilitate community ownership and involvement. No one party owns or controls AlmaLinux.
We don’t view anyone as “the other team” either, and we are glad, and here, to work together with everyone.
The way we see it is that we are all family now as well and people have different needs. We are sure CentOS Stream is going to be great for those whose needs it fills and you really can’t beat the engineering team behind it. Time has already proven their prowess and some of them are close personal friends. That being said, we are trying our absolute hardest to make sure that we are the best community and distribution for people whose needs fall on the other side of the road.
We are here to work together to build an ecosystem that is greater than the sum of its parts. I’ve spent, at this point, the majority of my life in the the EL extended family (including Fedora) and I can confidently say it is the most powerful platform for innovation, certainly of my generation. It has helped either directly or indirectly spawn or support probably most of today’s most leading technological advancements, everything from the the way we develop and deploy software, huge advancements in space exploration, particle physics research, AI, biological breakthroughs, art, finance and everything in between. It’s taken a collaborative, global effort to make that materialize and we are here to keep that going.
There is no horizon we cannot explore, no sea we cannot cross and no peak we cannot summit. Together.
19 thoughts on - Almalinux?
Hi Mark,
yup.
So far I upgraded a couple of test machines using the conversion tool they provided on GitHub (works fine, although it seems each and every package will be re-downloaded during the migration process which makes it a bit tedious), and I used my own KVM/virt-install/Kickstart/Ansible-Workflow to bring up one new server from scractch with no further change than swapping the ISO image for CentOS against the one for Alma 8.3.
Both procedures worked absolutely flawless, and so far I still have to find the first issue with any of the machines converted to or initially set up with AlmaLinux.
Caveat:
1. All of the machines I tried are VMs, no bare metal servers or VM hosts.
2. All of the machines are headless with no GUI installed at all.
3. No UEFI or Secure Boot (the latter is an open issue with Alma AFAIK).
On the other hand I did not need to change a single bit of Ansible code or Kickstart template in order to make it work, so the compatibility to CentOS seems to be very good.
Regards,
Peter.
wasn’t it present under cloudlinux name with modifications compared to the original RHEL/CentOS?
Also maintained by business unit, which might impact later changes when you tight your prod to it. in that case looks like Rgular CentOS8-stream would seem better idea with local package copy/snapshot….
—
Ruslanas Gžibovskis
+370 6030 7030
I’ve cross-graded two C8 VMs over to AL8 and thus far smooth operation.
+1
I did my estimate of what will last, so I don’t have to jump my infrastructure through hoops and loops again soon, so my decision:
1. Debian
2. on machines that will require cuda: Ubuntu (Debian clone which will support NVIDIA proprietary stuff)
3. FreeBSD (all servers: jails on FreeBSD)
This decision will let me to not make fundamental changes soon. Not guaranteed, but I have good record of such decisions made by me in the past.
I hope, this helps somebody.
Valeri
). Do note the release notes specifically
—
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Valeri Galtsev Sr System Administrator Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics University of Chicago Phone: 773-702-4247
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
We are moving it into production as we speak!
Todd Merriman Software Toolz, Inc.
I hoped they would join forces and produce only one RHEL clone but put some effort into bringing EPEL to a usable state for EL8 instead. IMHO
that would help *MUCH* more than to have two almost identical rebuilds of RHEL.
Simon
Hi Simon,
+1
I expect that to happen sooner or later. Currently Alma has a head start with Rocky postponed until the end of April, but to me the race is still open.
As is the case with many other colleagues, I’m currently stuck with RHEL clones because RHEL/CentOS is what my customers are using and they are not going to switch to Debian/FreeBSD/Ubuntu/whatever any time soon for a plethora of reasons. So it would be nice to have a one-stop-solution instead of having to decide which of the clones will be the more future-proof option.
Regards,
Peter.
A major part of the announcement videocast was about the formation of the 501c6 non-profit foundation that will back the distro. While it does indeed appear that everyone *currently* working on it works for CloudLinux it was also clear that their longer-term intention is to have the Alma Foundation be completely independent.
Yeah, I know, I shouldn’t be promoting the “other team,” but I don’t see them that way, and I would not want this list to be a source of any misinformation about them.
—
Rich Bowen: CentOS Community Manager rbowen@redhat.com
@rbowen // @CentOSProject
1 859 351 9166
Le 05/04/2021 à 18:20, mark a écrit :
Linux.
Reinventing the wheel since 1991.
:o)
—
Microlinux – Solutions informatiques durables
7, place de l’église – 30730 Montpezat Site : https://www.microlinux.fr Blog : https://blog.microlinux.fr Mail : info@microlinux.fr Tél. : 04 66 63 10 32
Mob. : 06 51 80 12 12
I installed the beta when it came out on a VM running under C7. I
upgrade every day or two and Alma upgrades have so far been seamless. It’s transited from beta to RC and now to stable.
I installed the RC on a USB stick to allow me to run as bare metal on a laptop (which unfortunately has to remain as Win10). It ran fine until the upgrade to stable, but then corrupted the image during the upgrade. I reinstalled and it seems to be running fine.
I’ve been trialing Springdale as well (as a VM).
Requirements are:
OwnCloud DokuWiki Zotero DNS slave, eventual master DHCP server NFS server Thunderbird Firefox KeePass OpenOffice FreeCAD
Octave Lilypond and Frescobaldi Compilers: GNU and others. I’ll probably think of a few users as I work through them!
There used to be several RHEL clones too, but many (some??) have dropped by the wayside. I started with TaoLinux, a rebuild of EL6, by basically one guy at a university, because he wanted his own RHEL clone to run at work. when he changed jobs he worked with Johnny to come up with a transition for Taolinux users to turn their systems into CentOS systems. As I understand it, also, Scientific Linux has quit and urges its users to go to CentOS (or did, before the big hullabaloo in the CentOS world). there was also Whitebox LInux, but I don’t know what ever became of it.
So, hopefully those doing rebuilds of 8 will also eventually coalesce into a smaller number, hopefully 1.
Fred
No one has said it, but everyone that’s tried it – what’s it at? I’m on CentOS 7. Do I have to go to 8 for Alma? Is there a 7? Is the conversion script someone mentioned for same release, or upgrade, or…?
mark
They will not be doing a 7. Just 8.
That said … it’s probably a great idea to take this conversation over to *their* mailing lists. There’s an extent to which this conversation is relevant to this list – after all, we’re all part of the same extended family now – but once it starts becoming a technical discussion of Alma itself, it’s veering off-topic, and you’ll get better answers over there.
–Rich (With community manager hat on, trying to avoid this thread getting out of hand. No, it’s not yet. Just trying to avoid it.)
Looking. Rocky was supposed to release something at the beginning of the month, but I haven’t seen anything.
-Frank
—–Original Message—
The release was postponed by one month.
“Unfortunately we’ve had to revise our previous update for a release candidate from March 31 to April 30, due to complications in the build efforts. We continue to make steady progress, and are optimistic about our revised timeline.”
<https://rockylinux.org/news/community-update-march-2021/>
+1
mark, CentOS 7 will be fully supported till EOL, so why waste time on AL7?
I would not convert CL7 to any 8 but if that is only reason you are asking about AL7 then your best bet is to convert CL7 to last CL8 (not CS8) and then convert CL8 to AL8.
—
Ljubomir Ljubojevic
(Love is in the Air)
PL Computers Serbia, Europe
StarOS, Mikrotik and CentOS/RHEL/Linux consultant
Rich .. I agree .. I don’t see Igor and company as the other team either.
I wished the almalinux team well on their launch day on reddit. This is because I know many of the people involved in CloudLinux and I have met them plenty of times at cPanel conferences and other places. I trust Igor and his team.
I personally feel that CentOS Stream is a great distro and once you guys actually see it in practice with all the engineering effort and community involvement working as envisioned, you will like it and it will meet your needs.
In my post I said as much about CentOS Stream .. but also IF you still want to do a downstream and not slightly upstream build of EL source code, I definitely would look at AlmaLinux.
Here is a link to my post:
https://www.reddit.com/r/AlmaLinux/comments/mgic42/congrats_on_almalinux_release/
My ultimate goal is to make CentOS Stream the most used community distribution in the world .. but, in doing that there is no need to be negative toward AlmaLinux.
Thanks, Johnny Hughes
+1 agree, thanks for the additional information and staying positive in regards to other alternatives.
Thanks Rich for the kind words and Johnny for the support as well. Rich is correct about the non-profit foundation that was setup to facilitate community ownership and involvement. No one party owns or controls AlmaLinux.
We don’t view anyone as “the other team” either, and we are glad, and here, to work together with everyone.
The way we see it is that we are all family now as well and people have different needs. We are sure CentOS Stream is going to be great for those whose needs it fills and you really can’t beat the engineering team behind it. Time has already proven their prowess and some of them are close personal friends. That being said, we are trying our absolute hardest to make sure that we are the best community and distribution for people whose needs fall on the other side of the road.
We are here to work together to build an ecosystem that is greater than the sum of its parts. I’ve spent, at this point, the majority of my life in the the EL extended family (including Fedora) and I can confidently say it is the most powerful platform for innovation, certainly of my generation. It has helped either directly or indirectly spawn or support probably most of today’s most leading technological advancements, everything from the the way we develop and deploy software, huge advancements in space exploration, particle physics research, AI, biological breakthroughs, art, finance and everything in between. It’s taken a collaborative, global effort to make that materialize and we are here to keep that going.
There is no horizon we cannot explore, no sea we cannot cross and no peak we cannot summit. Together.
Thanks, Jack