Linux distribution
Alma is the Spanish word for soul. Nate Drake certainly feels his has been uplifted through this spiritual successor to CentOS.
A lmaLinux was released in 2021 in the wake of Red Hat’s announcement that it would discontinue downstream development of CentOS. Like CentOS, AlmaLinux is community-supported and aims for binary compatibility with RHEL.
New versions such as the latest (code-named Seafoam Ocelot) match the release and software versions of RHEL itself. This is done using freely available open source code via the AlmaLinux Build System. This is worthy of an article in its own right; the AlmaLinux Foundation has a 23 minute YouTube video on it works.
Like Red Hat, there’s a number of AlmaLinux images available. We chose from one of the many download mirrors and saw there were three main ISOs available: a boot image of around 1GB, a minimal image of around 2GB, and a 10GB DVD image.
We used one of the offered download mirrors to set up AlmaLinux 9.4 in a virtual machine, as well as manually installing a desktop environment. Spare yourself this and test the OS in a live environment by downloading an AlmaLinux image from https://repo. almalinux.org/almalinux/9/live/x86_64/.
This not only allows you to try the OS without installing but offers a variety of desktop environments including Gnome Mini (core environment with a Firefox browser), Gnome proper, KDE, Xfce, MATE and more.
On the plus side, using our chosen download mirror allowed us to go through the install process, which is virtually identical to RHEL. You must specify the partitions (automatic partitioning and disk encryption are supported) and create a user account. You can also optionally set a root password, which we recommend as our created user account wasn’t a member of the sudo group on first boot.
The bundled Firefox browser defaults to the AlmaLinux homepage and includes useful bookmarks such as Documentation, which points to the comprehensive AlmaLinux wiki. This contains easy-tofollow step-by-step instructions for setup, as well as comprehensive release notes for Seafoam Ocelot.
It was here we learned that AlmaLinux 9.4 comes with extended hardware support. The developers claim this was done in response to requests by community members running olde
