
Throughout the last few weeks, the team at CloudLinux has worked tirelessly to gear our internal infrastructure to meet the needs of launching a free, open, public Linux distro that’s driven by the community.
We’ve committed to AlmaLinux, and we see the associated responsibilities in a serious light. While we are preparing the new distro for launch within the next month, we are also putting in place the structures that will ensure continuity for AlmaLinux - and that ensures community involvement.
Due Date
End of January - early February.
Infrastructure
Here is where we are currently at in terms of infrastructure, supporting team, and critical tools:
- 1. AlmaLinux is relying on existing CloudLinux infrastructure that includes the OpenNebula cloud management platform hosted on our bare-metal servers.
- 2. We’ve established a comprehensive supporting team that includes the following roles:
-
- a. Packaging - debranding RPMs, packaging
- b. Development - developing our toolchain
- c. Signing and release - signing packages, composing the distribution
- d. QA - testing and automation
- e. Infrastructure - infrastructure deployment and maintenance
- 3. Key tools including a bug tracker, public repos, wiki, and a forum will all be available to coincide with the Beta release.
- 4. Our new website is live and ready to view - just visit almalinux.org.
- 5. The AlmaLinux Github organization is also live, we will release all source code on GitHub as soon as source code is finalized.
Packaging
At the time of writing we are taking the following approach to packaging:
- 1. Right now, we are using the internal CloudLinux build system for both building and testing.
- 2. We also use Jenkins, Packer, Ansible and other open source software to implement our testing pipeline.
Community
To make a success of AlmaLinux we need the close involvement of the Linux community. Here are our efforts so far:
- 1. We’ve chosen and announced the new name for the endeavour we initially code-named Project Lenix. That name is, of course, AlmaLinux.
- 2. In the space of just over a month our community has expanded quickly: we currently have over 900 members on Reddit (/r/ProjectLenix/ & /r/AlmaLinux/).
- 3. You can look forward to a blog and mailing list for future announcements and community updates. Sign up for the updates here.
- 4. Slack will be our group chat tool, the Slack workspace will be ready soon.
- 5. We are working to build a governance board with members from the community, this governing board will function as a voice of the community and as a central source for decision making.
- 6. Media coverage so far includes:
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- a. Data Center Knowledge
- b. Computer Weekly
- c. TFIR
- d. FOSSMint
- e. Learning Linux TV
- f. Host Review
- g. ZDNet
- h. DevOps.com
- i. Hosting Journalist
- j. Linux Magazine
- k. Linux Security
- l. ZDNet
- m. TechRadar
- n. Heise
- o. The Register
- p. ItsFOSS
- q. TugaTech
- r. Developpez
- s. Web Hosting Talk
- t. SDx Central
- u. IT Wire
- v. Yahoo Finance
- w. Slashdot
You, the Linux community, gave a very warm welcome to AlmaLinux. From everyone at AlmaLinux, a big thank you.
We also thank you for your contribution to our public channels. Yes, CloudLinux initiated AlmaLinux as a CentOS replacement. But AlmaLinux is a Linux distribution developed for the community to fill an important gap. Your contribution, input, and support is essential throughout launching AlmaLinux. And in future. Together, we will build AlmaLinux into the stable, forever-free server OS the community needs.
Soon, we’ll announce our community-based governance board. In the meantime, if you have any direct feedback or if you want to join the regulatory board, you can let us know by completing the sign-up form on the AlmaLinux website.
Do you have any questions, comments, concerns, suggestions? Or just want to help out? please feel free to reach out to us via email at: [email protected]
PS: don’t forget you can sign up for news updates at almalinux.org.
Sincerely,
The AlmaLinux Team
[email protected]
OpenNebula link is broken 😉
Thank you, Michele! We fixed it 🙂
I installed the minimal beta on a local test server today, and then installed Virtualmin on it. (I had to fool the Virtualmin installer into thinking it was CentOS, but that was the only change I made to the AlmaLinux installation.)
I'm happy to say that both AlmaLinux and Virtualmin installed without error, and everything I've tested so far has worked perfectly. I also have it on good authority that Virtualmin will be officially supporting AlmaLinux in the very near future.
Thank you for this. I appreciate your work, and I'm sure I'm not alone in that.
Updating my own comment, I spent a couple of hours today (all the time I had between work and the snow) simulating the initial setup of a production server running Virtualmin on Linux (phpMyAdmin, CSF, and so forth). I also restored a MySQL-driven site from a Virtualmin backup.
Everything went flawlessly.
Thanks again. I owe you a nice dinner and a bottle of your favorite beverage.
Hi. Sorry for my bad english.
Just a interesting thing.
The word, alma, in hungarian is apple.
But these distro is better 😉
Best regards
Attila from Hungary
trying to install cPanel as a test and the cPanel installer gives an error. Are you working with cPanel to make this work?
cPanel doesn't support AlmaLinux yet. The main hurdle is in their "OS discovery" mechanism that is hard-wired in cPanel. Otherwise, it works.
cPanel team is in constant communication with us, and are promising to make it work sooner rather than later.
The cPanel team committed to supporting AlmaLinux back in December:
https://blog.cpanel.com/centos-8-end-of-life-announcement/#:~:text=Accelerated%20end%2Dof%2Dlife%20for,part%20of%20the%20stable%20branch
So stay tuned for the updates.
Two successful installs of AlmaLinux-8.3-beta-1-x86_64-minimal.
1st on Oracle VirtualBox 6.1, 2nd on HP Z420 (bare metal).
No problems seen yet. Well done guys.
Hi. Tried to install AmlaLinux on Oracle Virtualbox 6.1 using the DVD iso and nothing happened. It didn't matter if I went directly to install or to test the media. The VM just remained blank. Re-tried with differing memory and disk sizes for the VM, but same result. The installation worked first time on a Windows Hyper-V VM
Hi Grant. It's a known issue of the current beta that it doesn't support UEFI boot. If you configure the VM to boot using BIOS settings instead, it will work. This will be fixed soon. Thank you for the feedback.
I am all on board with switching from CentOS.
So you wrote this on your site:
Switching Linux distros can be a headache, but that is not the case when switching from CentOS to AlmaLinux. Just like CentOS, AlmaLinux is a 1:1 binary compatible fork of RHEL, so switching is simple. We will provide a single command to swap repositories and keys once the Beta is out."
I see that the Beta is out. Where is this command? I don't want to install the Beta, I just want to run the command to convert an existing CentOS server to Alma.
Thanks much.
Hi Danny
The script has been released some days ago. You can find it here:
https://github.com/AlmaLinux/almalinux-deploy
It's open source, so any suggestions or improvements, feel free to create pull requests for them.
Thank you for your feedback.