AlmaLinux 9 Officially Released, Based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9

AlmaLinux 9

The AlmaLinux OS Foundation announced today that AlmaLinux 9 is now available for download as the newest version of this popular CentOS alternative derived from Red Hat Enterprise Linux’s source code.

Powered by Linux 5.14 LTS kernel series and based on and fully compatible with the recently-released Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 operating system, AlmaLinux 9 is here as the first release of AlmaLinux that stems from CentOS Stream through RHEL.

AlmaLinux 9 introduces new functionality that makes it easier to automate and deploy at scale, networking enhancements for cloud and edge through the addition of more performance metrics in Web Cockpit, access to information to identify bottlenecks, the ability to apply kernel live patching inside Web Cockpit, easier data export to data analytics and reporting tools like Grafana, as well as the ability to build images via a single build node.

This release also makes AlmaLinux a more secure operating system via higher grade encryption and SELinux speed improvements, along with the ability to use Smart Card authentication to access remote hosts, additional security profiles to help achieve compliance with standards like PCI-DSS and HIPAA, more logging details from SSSD, OpenSSL 3 support, and disablement of SSH root password login by default.

For application developers, AlmaLinux 9 brings some of the latest and greatest GNU/Linux technologies, including GCC 11 as the default system compiler, Python 3.9 with proper timezone support, dictionary update, a new high-performant parser, merge operators, and new string functions, as well as GNU C Library 2.34, and the latest versions of the LLVM, Rust, and Go compilers.

You can download AlmaLinux 9 right now from the official website as ISO images for the 64-bit (x86_64), AArch64 (ARM64), PowerPC 64-bit Little Endian (ppc64le), and IBM System z (s390x) architectures. AlmaLinux Universal Base Images are also available as standard, micro, minimal, and init flavors with an updated Podman container engine and cgroup2 by default. Live ISOs are also available here with the GNOME, KDE Plasma or Xfce desktops.

Also, those who want to migrate from CentOS Linux or Red Hat Enterprise Linux to AlmaLinux can use the ELevate Project, an open-source initiative designed to assist users in performing migrations between different Red Hat Enterprise Linux-based distributions. More details can be found here.

Image credits: AlmaLinux OS Foundation

Last updated 2 years ago

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