The developers of the AlmaLinux operating system have announced the general availability for AlmaLinux 9. This release came one week after the release of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 (RHEL 9); the Linux distribution on which AlmaLinux 9 is based. It delivers similar features to RHEL 9, however, is a free operating system.
Many improvements for the Web Console
AlmaLinux 9, which is a CentOS alternative, runs Linux kernel 5.14.0-70.13.1.el9_0 under the hood. It delivers some enhancements around cloud and container development as well as improvements for extra security. AlmaLinux 9 restricts the use of SHA-1 for signatures in the default crypto policy. The developers warn there might be some issues with this change while accessing the older systems via SSH, so they provide a solution to enable SHA-1 when needed. You can use the following command to activate SHA-1:
update-crypto-policies --set DEFAULT:SHA1
The new release signs the packages and repositories with the new RPM-GPG-KEY-AlmaLinux-9 GPG key while adding SAP and SAP HANA repositories to the system. It also brings some enhancements to Web Console (cockpit); delivering more performance metrics as well as the capability of identifying bottlenecks. Web Console now also can apply live kernel patch and build images via a single build node. Additionally, AlmaLinux 9 enables Smart Card Authentication through Web Console and introduces new security profiles.
The SELinux performance has been greatly improved and SSSD delivers additional logging details. AlmaLinux 9 comes with new wallpapers as well. The remaining package changes can be seen below:
- Perl 5.32
- PHP 8.0
- Git 2.31
- Apache HTTP Server 2.4.51
- Varnish Cache 6.6
- Squid 5.2
- MySQL 8.0
- Redis 6.2
- GCC 11.2.1
- glibc 2.34
- binutils 2.35.2
- Go Toolset 1.17.7
- PCP 5.3.5
- Grafana 7.5.11
- GDB 10.2
- Valgrind 3.18.1
- SystemTap 4.6
- Dyninst 11.0.0
- elfutils 0.186
- Maven 3.6
- Ant 1.10
Upgrade AlmaLinux 9.0 Beta to AlmaLinux 9
To upgrade a system from AlmaLinux 9.0 Beta to AlmaLinux 9, you can use the following command, twice:
dnf upgrade -y
Download AlmaLinux 9
You can also download the ISO images for x86_64, ARM64, ppc664le, and s390x systems and choose from Boot, Minimal and DVD versions by following the link below:
Architecture | Download Link |
---|---|
x86_64 | AlmaLinux 9.0 x86_64 |
aarch64 | AlmaLinux 9.0 aarch64 |
ppc64le | AlmaLinux 9.0 ppc64le |
s390x | AlmaLinux 9.0 s390x |