[CentOS] almalinux?

Mon Apr 5 16:50:21 UTC 2021
Peter Eckel <lists at eckel-edv.de>

Hi Mark, 

> 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.

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.