Inside AlmaLinux
LINUX FOR THE SOUL
Jonni Bidwell wants a free, enterprise-grade operating system and word on the street is AlmaLinux is the coolest one going…
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ur “Faster Better Servers” feature in LXF278 attracted more than the usual number of letters, and they weren’t solely about the glorious racing car imagery. Some called for a more practical and fairer treatment. OK!
Red Hat Enterprise Linux takes security seriously and the ecosystem is rich with tried-and-tested tooling. This is all inherited by the communities downstream (such as CentOS, Rocky Linux and AlmaLinux) making any one of them a fine choice for your Faster, Better servers. It would be good to explore that. Thousands of machines at CERN and Facebook ran CentOS, and perhaps you did too. CentOS 8 will see its support period expire at the end of 2021, as Red Hat concentrate their efforts on CentOS Stream. So some might still be looking to migrate.
And those that have migrated away from CentOS may be questioning their choices. Fortunately, a product of CentOS 8 and any of the new projects to emerge as a result of its demise being 1-1 binary compatible with RHEL is that they are 1-1 binary compatible with each other. So it should always be straightforward to switch between them. CentOS Stream, Red Hat’s community offering that will be the proving ground for future RHEL releases, isn’t going to be every CentOS Original user’s cup of tea. But who knows which of the new distros will stand the test of time, or what direction they’ll go in.
Another point of comment was that we really only covered CentOS Stream and Rocky Linux, set up by CentOS cofounder Greg Kurtzer and named after fellow co-founder Rocky McGough. These are by no means the only places for CentOS users to go. And we were perhaps remiss in not giving more attention to alternative RHEL downstreams. In particular AlmaLinux has established itself as a serious contender.
Alma takes its name from ‘soul’ in many languages, a nod to the ‘soul’ of Linux being its community. As such, it aims to be governed and guided by the community, very much in the spirit of the original Community ENTerprise Operating System. It’s also an enterprise grade OS that deserves to run on your servers, so we’ll show you how to set up an AlmaLinux virtual machine in a jiffy with Vagrant.