AlmaLinux has become a popular replacement for Red Hat Enterprise Linux’s free version since CentOS’s entry into the “stream.”
The new stable AlmaLinux 9.2 release for x86_64, aarch64, ppc64le, and s390x architectures, powered by Linux kernel 5.14, is ready for production and to power the computing needs and workloads. So let’s see what’s new.
AlmaLinux 9.2 Highlights
As always, security remains one of AlmaLinux’s hallmarks, and the new 9.2 release, codenamed “Turquoise Kodkod,” is no exception from this rule. The OpenSSL packages have been rebased to version 3.0.7, which contains various bug fixes and enhancements.
Many SELinux user-space packages, which include the sepolicy utility, have also been bumped to version 3.5. On top of that, Keylime, a highly scalable remote boot attestation, and runtime integrity measurement solution, received an update to 6.5.2, containing various enhancements and bug fixes.
Continuing with the changes on the security side, we cannot help but mention that OpenSCAP, a command-line utility designed to perform configuration and vulnerability scans on a local system to validate security compliance content, received an update to 1.3.7.
Some system and development tools have also received updates in the AlmaLinux 9.2 release, with the more important ones being Python 3.11, GCC Toolset 12, Rust 1.66, Go 1.19.6, Nginx 1.22, Git 2.39.1, PostgreSQL 15, Valgrind 3.19, and Grafana 9.0.9.
Finally, if you use Alma as a desktop system, the distro ships with GNOME 40.4, which runs on Wayland by default, and the availability of the Pipewire audio server.
For more information about all changes in AlmaLinux 9.2, you can refer to the official announcement, or you can visit the release notes.
The distro is currently available for four architectures, including x86_64, aarch64, ppc64le, and s390x. In addition, you can download the ISO installation image from one of the public mirrors.
Last but not least, if you are currently running AlmaLinux 9, to upgrade to the latest 9.2 release, run the following DNF command in the terminal:
sudo dnf upgrade -y
