AlmaLinux OS is an open source, community-governed and forever-free enterprise Linux distribution. It is focused on long-term stability and delivering a robust production-grade platform. It is a production-ready drop-in replacement for the CentOS Linux distribution that will cease to be supported at the end of this year.
Related: AlmaLinux’s ELevate Project Makes the Migration from CentOS 7 Easy
AlmaLinux OS Foundation, the nonprofit that stewards the community owned and governed open source CentOS alternative, today announced delivery of its third stable release within 48 hours of general availability of the upstream Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.5 release.
AlmaLinux 8.5 has full feature parity with RHEL’s newest release including improvements that make it easier for DevOps teams to manage containerized workloads, as well as updated programming languages and security and compliance tools.
As CentOS Linux comes to end of life this year, we aim to deliver the same high degree of quality, robustness, and timeliness end users would expect from a CentOS successor to provide a free and reliable, enterprise-grade Linux alternative.
Jack Aboutboul, community manager for AlmaLinux
AlmaLinux 8.5 includes improvements to container management tools, several new module streams, enhancements and additions to System Roles.
In addition there is an enhanced Cockpit web console, support for OpenJDK 17, additional security features for personal access tokens, and network time security (NTS) for Network Time Protocol (NTP).
Among the new features found in AlmaLinux 8.5, the SCAP Security Guide also includes new profiles and improvements for some of the existing profiles.
Later versions of the following components are now available as new module streams: The programming languages Ruby 3.0 and PHP 7.4.19, the runtime environment Node.js 16, the web server Nginx 1.20, the proxy server Squid 4.15 and the mail client Mutt 2.0 .7.
For more information about all changes in AlmaLinux 8.5, you can refer to the release notes or you can visit the project’s website.
Download AlmaLinux 8.5
This release supports the x86_64 and aarch64 architectures, including Raspberry Pi.
There are three installation ISO images available:
- AlmaLinux-8.5-x86_64-boot.iso – a single network installation CD image that downloads packages over the Internet.
- AlmaLinux-8.5-x86_64-minimal.iso – a minimal self-containing DVD image that makes possible offline installation.
- AlmaLinux-8.5-x86_64-dvd.iso – a full installation DVD image that contains mostly all AlmaLinux packages.
You can find the ISO downloads here or download them from one of the public mirrors. Go right ahead and use it.
