AlmaLinux has emerged as a popular option for Red Hat Enterprise Linux‘s free version since CentOS’s entry into the “stream.” This is the OS’s fourth stable release, proving the AlmaLinux Foundation’s commitment to delivering on its promises.
The new stable AlmaLinux 8.6 release for x86_64, aarch64, and ppc64le architectures are ready for production installations and power the computing needs and workloads. So let’s see what’s new in this release.
AlmaLinux 8.6 Highlights
AlmaLinux 8.6 includes web console improvements and some new System Roles that simplify system administration. System Roles are a set of Ansible roles and modules that provide a reliable and consistent configuration interface for automating and managing numerous OS releases.
The RPM package manager has also received some improvements in this release. Now you can query packages by a file that is currently not installed using a new --path CLI option.
This option is identical to the existing --file option, except it only finds packages based on the path specified. It should be noted that the file at that path does not have to exist on a disk.
Continuing with package management, we can’t fail to mention that the modulesync command is now available to replace certain workflows in AlmaLinux. For example, as you are probably know, modular packages cannot be installed without modular metadata. Previously, you could download packages with the yum command and then redistribute them with the createrepo_c command.
The modulesync command is introduced in AlmaLinux 8.6 to check the presence of modular metadata, which assures package installability. This command downloads rpm packages from modules and creates a repository with modular metadata in a working directory.
Another key highlight of this release is added drop-in configuration files support to OpenSSH. In other words, a .conf file is contained in a drop-in directory, and the contents are concatenated to the OpenSSH service with the same name as the drop-in directory.
Apart from those mentioned above, some packages have received updates in AlmaLinux 8.6. For example, there is a new module stream for PHP 8.0, Perl 5.32, and log4j 2. In addition, some compiler tools also received updates – GCC Toolset 11, Rust Toolset 1.58.1, Go Toolset 1.17.7, etc. On top of that, this release also adds two new repositories, namely Real Time (RT) and Real Time for NFV (NFV).
You can refer to the official announcement or release notes for detailed information about all changes.
Download AlmaLinux 8.6
There are three installation ISO images available:
- AlmaLinux-8.6-x86_64-boot.iso (800 MB) โ a single network installation CD image downloading packages over the Internet.
- AlmaLinux-8.6-x86_64-minimal.iso (1.6 GB) โ a minimal self-containing DVD image that allows offline installation.
- AlmaLinux-8.6-x86_64-dvd.iso (10 GB) โ 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. Since the full installation DVD file is large, 10 GB, the recommended way to download it is to use a tool like wget or torrent links. So, go right ahead and use it.
Of course, if you are already using AlmaLinux 8.x, there is no need for a new installation. All you need to do to upgrade your system to AlmaLinux 8.6 is to run the command shown below:
sudo dnf upgrade -y
