Catch up on stories from the past week (and beyond) at the Slashdot story archive

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
Operating Systems Red Hat Software Linux

AlmaLinux Released As a Stable RHEL Clone For Those Who Liked CentOS (zdnet.com) 43

Posted by EditorDavid from the different-distros dept.
Long-time Slashdot reader xiando quotes the backstory from LinuxReviews.org: CentOS used to be the go-to alternative for those who wanted to use Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) without having to pay RedHat to use it. It was a almost 1:1 clone until RedHat took control of it and turned it into what is now a RHEL beta-version, not a stable RHEL release without the branding. Almalinux is one of several projects that have made their own RHEL forks in response. The first Almalinux version is now released.
ZDNet notes that CentOS co-founder Gregory Kurtzer has announced his own RHEL clone and CentOS replacement named Rocky Linux. But they offer this report on AlmaLinux: CloudLinux — which was founded in 2009 to provide a customized, high-performance, lightweight RHEL/CentOS server clone for multitenancy web and server hosting companies — came ready to deliver. The new free AlmaLinux is now stable and ready for production workloads. The company also announced the formation of a non-profit organization: AlmaLinux Open Source Foundation. This group will take over managing the AlmaLinux project going forward. CloudLinux has committed a $1 million annual endowment to support the project.

Jack Aboutboul, former Red Hat and Fedora engineer and architect, will be AlmaLinux's community manager. Altogether, Aboutboul brings over 20 years of experience in open-source communities as a participant, manager, and evangelist... "In an effort to fill the void soon to be left by the demise of CentOS as a stable release, AlmaLinux has been developed in close collaboration with the Linux community," said Aboutaboul in a statement. "These efforts resulted in a production-ready alternative to CentOS that is supported by community members...."

In talking with CentOS business users, who deployed CentOS on web and host servers, I found many of them to be very hopeful about AlmaLinux. One from a mid-Atlantic-based Linux hosting company said, "What we want is a stable Linux that our customers can rely on from year to year. Since CentOS Stream can't deliver that, we think — hope — that AlmaLinux can do it for us and our users instead...."

This first release of AlmaLinux is a one-to-one binary compatible fork of RHEL 8.3. Looking ahead, AlmaLinux will seek to keep step-in-step with future RHEL releases... The GitHub page has already been published and the completed source code has been published in the main download repository. The CloudLinux engineering team has also published FAQ on AlmaLinux Wiki.
"The sudden shift in direction for CentOS that was announced in December created a big void for millions of CentOS users," said Simon Phipps, open source advocate and a former president of the Open Source Initiative who is on the governing board of the AlmaLinux project. In a statement, Phipps said that "As a drop-in open-source replacement, AlmaLinux provides those users with continuity and new opportunity to be part of a vibrant community built around creating and supporting this new Linux distribution under non-profit governance.

"I give a lot of credit to CloudLinux for stepping in to offer CentOS users a lifeline to continue with AlmaLinux."
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

AlmaLinux Released As a Stable RHEL Clone For Those Who Liked CentOS More

AlmaLinux Released As a Stable RHEL Clone For Those Who Liked CentOS

Comments Filter:
  • What about scientific Linux, oracle Linux, etc.... they are free and CentOS alternatives. Already available.

    • Scientific makes small changes designed to support the scientific high performance computing community. Mostly that's better than the default distro but if you want something that you can start testing on but be sure you can migrate to commercial support later, it's not as 100% safe. Since this is a 1:1 100% binary compatible clone where only things like the artwork will have changed, ensuring compatibility is simpler. Oracle also has some optional changes and it does come from Oracle, so hmmm.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by cdrei ( 7938476 )
        Sure, that is all good and well, but what about Rocky Linux [rockylinux.org], brought to you by the guy who created CentOS in the first place?

        • Re:Maybe I do not understand but (Score:5, Informative)

          by Junta ( 36770 ) on Saturday April 03, 2021 @04:24PM (#61233546)

          The AlmaLinux guys had more recent experience as they were already constanly rebuilding CentOS. While he was a key person creating it, he hadn't been on the project in a long time.

          As a result, AlmaLinux is available now and Rocky hasn't had a public beta yet.

          Rocky may ultimately win out to be 'the' standard, but Alma had no reason to wait and it was a good PR move for them to become known as a viable group to take the place of CentOS.

          • Yeah Rocky is slower to the table, but it should be a good OS. I purchased a Centos 8 VPS when Centos 6 went EOL and just before Redhat announced the killing of Centos 8. Stream might be OK for a web host but I doubt Redhats sincerity in working with the community in this space, and its not usable as a RHEL 1:1 replacement. The Alma Linux beta was the first C8 replacement available that I wanted to run. It was an easy swap and even though I started using it while it was still beta I encountered no issues.

      • They did in the past but Scientific Linux 7 was just a plain rebuild

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Junta ( 36770 )

      Scientific Linux had declared that they would not be doing a full distro for 8, because they felt they were too redundant with CentOS, and was a waste of effort.

      Oracle is on the face of it a very viable CentOS alternative. However, it *is* Oracle and thus most people are understandably skeptical that Oracle would keep it nice as Oracle is notorious for changing terms of free software to suddenly have huge problems for users.

      • Oracle Linux has as far as I am aware been around since 5. I recall we stopped buying RHEL at a previous employer because support from Oracle was less (like 8x less) than buying licenses for RHEL, and we used Oracle Database so the relationship with Oracle was already there. That was 10 years ago, and it is still around and free

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Junta ( 36770 )

          I strongly suspect that Linux is a relatively smaller team in Oracle behaving like a sane Linux oriented product mainly because their bosses recognize their share is too small to bother exploiting. I think the Linux team is doing things right, but I just have a difficult time trusting the larger Oracle.

          The JRE debacle was pretty cut and dry exactly the play I'd be worried about. Sun's JRE was the *standard* JRE choice, and that stayed the case as Oracle acquired sun. With Oracle as the defacto choice in ja

    • oracle Linux

      The Linux for those people who hate corporations which impose licen.... wait what?

      • Yeah they're out to destroy Redhat by cloneing their product and takeing the support $ away from Redhat. They have made a good clone with a fast update cycle and Redhat seem to be making it easier for Oracle to hurt them, but at the end of the day Oracle is still oracle. I nearly swapped to OEL but went Alma in the end because.. well... Oracle.

        • What will be interesting is to see how quick Oracle and Alama are at getting 8.4 out the door in due course. Oracle have a consistent track record at being much faster than CentOS went it comes to patches and point releases and that is a very attractive proposition for security reasons. If Oracle do play silly buggers down the line it would be trivial to replace the repos with Alma or Rocky and reimage our HPC system.

      • And that's exactly why Red Hat launched the witch hunt against rms -- to be able to control and neuter the GPL.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Junta ( 36770 )

          I'm doubtful.

          One, they don't need to, IIRC at least 40% of packages that comprise RHEL are BSD licensed. So if they really wanted to, they could close up enough to make a clone non-viable.

          For another, the FSF can't really mutate the license of existing GPL software. Even if they contain the ever 'interesting' 'or any later version', it would only apply so far as 'GPL 4.0' was compatible with GPL 2.0. So the kernel, for example, is pretty much stuck at being GPLv2 compatible, as they don't have copyright ass

    • they are free and CentOS alternatives. Already available.

      Now look up what CentOS was.

  • There are now a bunch of forks of the famed "Prominent North American Enterprise Linux vendor"'s distro, including AWS and Oracle. What they all have in common is that then they add some software on top of that in various ways. Even CentOS used to have add on repositories. I wonder if they could all come together to start building more on top of this and be ready to be fully self sufficient and then take over leadership if, in future, the "Prominent North American Enterprise Linux vendor" starts trying t

    • Re: Time to start a foundation? Cooperation? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by antus ( 6211764 ) on Saturday April 03, 2021 @07:32PM (#61234022)
      That can easily happen any time, but there are plenty of distros already. Suse immediately comes to mind if you still want a Redhat style OS with rpm packaging. Worth noting that its been reported that Redhat did this because Centos was too good and more and some big vendors were running Centos instead of RHEL (eg facebook, google). I see how this is problem for Redhat but for a company with consistantly greater profits quater on quater for many years this was a great way to hugely damage their own community and brand while strengthening their competition. :(

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by MSG ( 12810 )

        its been reported that Redhat did this because Centos was too good and more and some big vendors were running Centos instead of RHEL (eg facebook, google).

        Well, that's nonsense. The move to CentOS Stream was in part to make it easier for Red Hat to work *with* Facebook, who is now using systems based on Stream.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by bgarcia ( 33222 )

        Worth noting that its been reported that Redhat did this because Centos was too good and more and some big vendors were running Centos instead of RHEL (eg facebook, google).

        And this is how "rumors" become "facts" in peoples' minds. Google hasn't run any Linux distribution based on RedHat since 2007.

    • A bunch of forks indeed. Again, the Linux community adds more fragmentation. Sigh.

      We're in the process of leaving CentOS and all clones and moving to Ubuntu (LTS). The new streams of v8 seemed stupid to us. Also, not being able to move to a new major version without a disk wipe is crazy in this day and age.

      I suppose RH thought their decision would bring them more customers and more money, but I suspect they're going to regret the decision to change CentOS in the long run.

      • I would add that RHEL still requires you apply the updates *after* you have done the install. Debian based distributions you can supply the updates directory during install and get a fully patched system out of the box.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Junta ( 36770 )

          For interactive install, sure, but for unattended installs, you can direct the installer to have update repositories right from the get go for RH/RH clones from the onset.

  • Lennart-ware (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Just let it die already.

  • It's here - it works. It's available. Red Hat Enterprise Linux has just released 8.4 beta - what will be most interesting is how long it takes any of the clones other than Oracle to release an 8.4 when it finally comes out.

    • Yes, from the binary compatibility with RHEL point of view there will be nothing to choose between Alma and Rocky, so the differences will lie in areas like financial stability and the ability to track new RHEL releases in a timely fashion.

      I'm running Almalinux on one of my systems, and it seems fine so far. Literally nothing worth reporting, which is a good thing in this case.

  • Too late (Score:3)

    by Revek ( 133289 ) on Saturday April 03, 2021 @07:46PM (#61234064)
    We can count on RHEL/IBM screwing that up soon. IBM has never figured out to be anything other than a old guard dinosaur clinging to a business model that has lost its appeal. I have one server I'm still running centos 8 on. I've moved the others to Debian and its all working just fine. The one thats left will be gone before July.

  • Comment removed (Score:3)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Saturday April 03, 2021 @08:07PM (#61234104)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Red hat has poorer support than Ubuntu? Do you mean for laptops and random PC? For enterprise gear manufacturers make drivers for RedHat, some won't even run on the Debian derived distros. A business can buy a server and devices certified for Red Hat, and they'll work.

    • "Tell me don't you use an enterprise Linux without telling me you don't use an enterprise Linux."
      • Would upvote this 100x if I could. Not that Ubuntu/Debian isn't used in enterprises but acting as if RHEL/CentOS aren't supported is foolish as can be.

  • RedHat took control of it and turned it into what is now a RHEL beta-version

    This gets repeated a lot, but it's complete nonsense. CentOS Stream packages get all of the testing and QA that RHEL packages did (and do).

    CentOS Stream is not, in any way, a beta. The only outward evidence that it is, is that it gets packages earlier than RHEL because it doesn't need to wait for a minor release to introduce new features, the way that semantic versioning would require. But if getting packages first makes a distribution "beta", then RHEL was the beta for CentOS.

    That sounds silly, doesn't

    • RedHat took control of it and turned it into what is now a RHEL beta-version

      This gets repeated a lot, but it's complete nonsense. CentOS Stream packages get all of the testing and QA that RHEL packages did (and do).

      https://www.redhat.com/en/blog... [redhat.com]

      While CentOS Stream provides continuous delivery of new RHEL development, a RHEL beta release is a "point in time" of CentOS Stream that is then hardened and tested to make it ready for production previews.

      CentOS is an alpha. It is the pre-beta for RHEL.

      Were you born stupid, or do you put a lot of work into it?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Junta ( 36770 )

      This gets repeated a lot, but it's complete nonsense. CentOS Stream packages get all of the testing and QA that RHEL packages did (and do).

      Well, considering RHEL beta is now stated to be a snapshot of Stream that will then undergo validation under the name 'beta', then absolutely Stream is, by RedHat's standards, beta. Now I have seen a RedHat person declare that Stream is equivalent in quality to Ubuntu LTS, and that's a tough thing to quantify, but notably Canonical is willing to stand up and provide commercial support for LTS, meanwhile RedHat is not willing to provide commercial support for Stream, so at least on that front it seems that C

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Halo5 ( 63934 )

        The scenarios that I could see as killing off Alma/Rocky would be ... for RHEL to close up all their BSD and BSD-like licensed packages to make it impractical to aim for a compatible distribution anymore.

        If that were to ever happen, it would be the end of RedHat. If you think that the whole CentOS was a debacle, just imagine the fallout from RHEL going closed-source!

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Junta ( 36770 )

          I would also think so, however I have heard a few folks on the business side of RedHat, and you can tell they absolutely hate the 'freeloader' scenario, so much that I would not be surprised if they had their choice that they would close-up stuff given the chance.

          They think they are still doing the community a huge favor by even allowing Stream to happen, and lamented how Rocky and Alma were going to be wasting their time cloning instead of working on Stream. Also that they are hugely generous for merely re

          • Re: (Score:1)

            by Halo5 ( 63934 )

            I have heard a few folks on the business side of RedHat, and you can tell they absolutely hate the 'freeloader' scenario, so much that I would not be surprised if they had their choice that they would close-up stuff given the chance.

            Well, the current CEO of RH is the very person who championed the subscription model, so that doesn't surprise me. However, I think many of the RH engineers who are kernel developers are huge open source advocates and so, I think there would be a LOT of fallout (and RH management doesn't seem all that great at gauging fallout, IMO).

  • Uyuni (fork of Spacewalk by SUSE in 2018 and upstream of SUSE Manager) merged support for managing Alma Linux clients a couple of weeks ago and it will be available in the upcoming Uyuni 2021.04.

    https://www.uyuni-project.org/ [uyuni-project.org]
    https://github.com/uyuni-proje... [github.com]

Slashdot Top Deals

I have hardly ever known a mathematician who was capable of reasoning. -- Plato

Close