As we shared with you in December, AlmaLinux has released a beta version of its upcoming AlmaLinux 10. This beta offers a sneak peek at the features we can expect in the future release and is designed with testers in mind.
In light of this, thanks to the ELevate project, you can now perform an in-place upgrade from Alma 9 to 10 beta, a feature that became available just a few days ago.
For those who are hearing about the ELevate Project for the first time, it’s an AlmaLinux initiative that aims to simplify in-place upgrades between major versions of enterprise Linux distributions. It takes the stress out of moving from one major release to another, providing a user-friendly toolset to ensure everything goes smoothly.
For all wondering, “Will I be able to use ELevate to upgrade from Alma 10 beta to 10 stable when it’s released?” the short answer is no. When the stable version of AlmaLinux 10 is released, ELevate will only support upgrades from version 9 to the final 10 stable release.
But don’t worry. If you are running AlmaLinux 10 beta, you can use the regular update process to transition to the stable release once it arrives.
It’s worth noting also that the ELevate Project team has revisited the list of supported distributions. Since EuroLinux was discontinued in October last year, the project will no longer offer support for upgrading to it.
Regarding the tool itself, in the last few months, ELevate has been updated with some fixes, improvements, and refinements designed to enhance its reliability and user experience.
If you’re wondering whether you need to upgrade your current stable AlmaLinux 9 systems to the 10 beta, let me make it crystal clear: absolutely not! This upgrade is specifically intended only for testing purposes—and should not be used in production environments.
Consider it an early testbed, allowing Alma’s developers to refine the process and address any hidden quirks well before the final, stable release, enabling you to upgrade your enterprise Linux 9.x distros to their respective 10th versions once RHEL 10 is released in Q2.
If you are interested in participating, you can find detailed instructions on how to test the migration on the ELevate documentation pages. Additionally, users are encouraged to report any bugs they encounter to the ELevate leapp repository on GitHub.
For more information, see Alma’s announcement.
