With AlmaLinux 8.3, CloudLinux presents the first stable version of its CentOS replacement. In the future, a foundation will be responsible for supervising the project.
The provider of CloudLinux OS, A CentOS-based Linux distribution tailored for hosting providers, CloudLinux, Inc, has released the first stable version of its CentOS successor, AlmaLinux. AlmaLinux 8.3 is binary compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 (RHEL8).
Triggered by Red Hat’s announcement that CentOS would only be continued as a rolling release from the end of this year without fixed version cycles, there was some resentment in the community, but also various activities. As a company directly affected, CloudLinux initially launched a CentOS clone under the name Lenix. In January, the project was renamed AlmaLinux, which is said to have been inspired by the Spanish word for soul.
By the community, for the community
From the community’s feedback on the one published at the same time In the beta version, a lot of work went into debugging, package selection and stabilization for productive operation. AlmaLinux 8.3 supports SecureBoot and can be used in both AWS and VMware environments. To make it easier to migrate existing CentOS installations, the developers have built a migration script, almalinux-deploy, so that AlmaLinux can serve as a direct replacement. A GitHub page summarizes information about the source code and the download. Further details such as FAQ and release notes can be found in the project wiki.
To ensure further development and cooperation with the community, CloudLinux founded the “AlmaLinux Open Source Foundation” was launched and wants to support it with one million US dollars annually. Jack Aboutboul, who held this role for ten years at Fedora, will be the community manager. Joining him on the Board of Directors are cPanel’s Jesse Asklund, open source advocate and former OSI President Simon Phipps, CloudLinux CEO Igor Seleski, and CloudLinux Director of Release Engineering Eugene Zamriy. The community should elect two more members. The Foundation aims to ensure that AlmaLinux will also track future RHEL version changes and remain freely available as a Linux distribution. CloudLinux will contribute suitable support offers.
In addition to AlmaLinux, Rocky Linux, initiated by CentOS founder Gregory Kurtzer, is another successor in the starting blocks. According to its blog, the project is aiming for the first release in the second quarter of 2021.
