AlmaLinux
As we discussed in our future of CentOS article last month there is a huge amount of interest in many up and coming Linux distros. One hotly tipped contender to take the crown from CentOS is AlmaLinux and it is going live in just 1 day’s time on the 30th March.
In preparation for this, let us take you through a whistlestop tour of all you need to know about AlmaLinux
What is it?
In a sentence: AlmaLinux is a standalone OS that is a fork of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).
It is completely free with no licencing costs and uses the traditional CentOS stable release, long-term support model. This project was not created specifically due to the CentOS stream changes, but its release has definitely been spurred by the news.
What are the features?
You can view the full list on their site, but here are our favourite features:
- Completely free and open source with community support
- Binary compatible with RHEL8 so all your favourite packages will install and run out the box
- Partially developed and funded by the CloudLinux team
- In place conversion available for RedHat 8, CentOS 8 and Oracle Linux 8
- Availability for CPanel already, with Plesk support on the way
- Support guaranteed all the way to 2029
What's the difference from CloudLinux?
Given that the CloudLinux team have been very vocal about this OS it can be a bit confusing to understand the difference. The important thing to note is that both AlmaLinux and CloudLinux 8 will both exist as standalone operating systems. Although they both share the same parent OS and they will likely have a large amount of shared development experience – particularly in the early days – there will be key differences.
CloudLinux OS will remain the primary product for that team; their paid-for RHEL fork that has seen massive adoption by hosting providers will continue as before. It is very much expected that they headline features of CloudLinux will remain exclusive in order to justify the licence cost:
- LVE Manager with its user resource governor
- php, python and ruby version selector
- Helpdesk style support
I'm sold! How can I get it?
On the 30th March, AlmaLinux will be running a live event to begin the official public launch of the OS. You can view the livestream here.
For most users, the easiest way to get AlmaLinux on your server will be to convert from an exisiting RHEL8 install. This will involve a shell script that will update your repos, kernel and get necessary packages installed so you can be up and running after a single reboot.
Of course, you can always just install from scratch with an iso https://repo.almalinux.org/almalinux/8/isos/x86_64/
However you install AlmaLinux, be sure to get all your files from our in-house mirror server at https://mirror.cov.ukservers.com/almalinux for the fastest installs!