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Following the release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.6, the AlmaLinux OS Foundation announced today the general availability of AlmaLinux OS 8.6 as a free alternative to the RHEL and CentOS systems.
AlmaLinux OS 8.6 “Sky Tiger” builds on the changes implemented by Red Hat in their Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.6 release and adds two new repositories, namely Real Time (RT) and Real Time for NFV (NFV), as well as new module streams like PHP 8.0, Perl 5.32, Apache Log4j 2, and container-tools 4.0.
It also contains all the goodies from Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.6, such as the numerous Web Console enhancements, brand-new System Roles to make system administration simpler, as well as updated versions of the SCAP Security Guide and OpenSCAP components for better security.
Also added from Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.6 is support for drop-in configuration files to OpenSSH, a new --checksum option to the semodule command to verify the versions of installed SELinux policy modules, and many of the latest compiler tools including GCC 11, LLVM 13.0.1, Rust 1.58.1, and Go 1.17.7.
AlmaLinux OS 8.6 is available for download right now from the official website as ISO images for 64-bit (x86_64), ARM64 (AArch64), and PowerPC 64-bit Little Endian (ppc64le) architectures, and it’s ready for production deployment. Live, Raspberry Pi, Cloud, and Container images will also be available for download shortly.
Existing AlmaLinux OS 8.5 users can upgrade their installations to AlmaLinux OS 8.6 by following the upgrade instructions provided in the release notes.
Since AlmaLinux OS aims to be a production-ready and drop-in replacement for the discontinued CentOS Linux distribution, you should check out AlmaLinux’s ELevate project, which promises to simplify the migration between major versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux-based distributions from the 7.x to the 8.x series, such as CentOS 7.x to any 8.x series of distributions of your choice from the same family.
Last updated 2 years ago
