Download of the day: AlmaLinux DVD/CD ISO

AlmaLinux is the first significant replacement for CentOS Linux 8. As you know, CentOS 8 Linux, as a rebuild of RHEL 8, will end in 2021. AlmaLinux is a free and open-source RHEL 8 fork built by the team at CloudLinux, inspired by the community. Let us take a quick look at AlmaLinux 8 and how to download AlmaLinux DVD/CD ISO on your system.

AlmaLinux OS is an enterprise-grade server operating systems. It is a stable Linux distribution with regular releases that come with long support windows. You can rely on AlmaLinux OS to run your critical workloads. I decided to Download AlmaLinux DVD/CD ISO and try it out to see how it works.

Download AlmaLinux DVD/CD ISO images

We can use the wget command to download AlmaLinux DVD/CD ISO images. One can use the curl command to download files too:

VERSION="8.3"
wget https://repo.almalinux.org/almalinux/8/isos/x86_64/CHECKSUM
wget "https://repo.almalinux.org/almalinux/8/isos/x86_64/AlmaLinux-${VERSION}-x86_64-dvd.iso"

Verify the downloaded DVD iso image using the sha256sum command as follows:
sha256sum --ignore-missing -c CHECKSUM
OR redirect only standard (stderr) as follows:
sha256sum --ignore-missing -c CHECKSUM 2>/dev/null

WARNING: Be careful with the USB stick/pen/disk names. Wrong names always result in data loss. Make sure you type the correct USB name. The author or nixCraft blog is not responsible for data loss.

Once verified, we can burn the downloaded DVD image file to a USB pen drive as follows:
sudo dd if=AlmaLinux-8.3-x86_64-dvd.iso of=/dev/sdb bs=1M status=progress

First boot (installation)

Now I have download AlmaLinux DVD/CD ISO on my system. It is time to play with it. I decided to test AlmaLinux with KVM running on my Ubuntu 20.04 desktop. I was greeted with a familiar RHEL/CentOS 8 installer:

Applying security updates

Once I logged in I fired up Terminal app and used the dnf command/yum command to apply updates:

Summing up

IBM/Red Hat software did not keep the promise of EOL for CentOS 8. Hence, we have AlmaLinux here. RockyLinux is another distro in work and is expected to hit the final release soon. I believe the secure-boot option is still missing, but they are working on it. Third-party repos worked well with AlmaLinux. IBM/Red Hat introduces a new no-cost RHEL 8 option that developers and the team can have up to 16 systems. Do we need AlmaLinux? The short answer is yes. There is no registration for RHN when using AlmaLinux. You can download AlmaLinux DVD/CD ISO and install it on as many systems as you want while maintaining 100% binary compatibility with upstream. And if you enjoyed RHEL 8 (CentOS 8) and want 100% binary compatibility, give it a try. Head over to the official project website for more info. Would you try AlmaLinux OS or wait for RockyLinux? Let me know in the comment section below.

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