AlmaLinux: Release day!

AlmaLinux 8.3 (open-source RHEL8 fork) has been officially released today. Updated BlueOnyx 5210R ISOs and OS templates are available.

After a period of rigorous testing, a Beta and a Release Candidate phase the team over at CloudLinux has finally released AlmaLinux 8.3 and it is now ready for production and general usage.

5210R ISO Image based on AlmaLinux 8.3

We already had released BlueOnyx 5210R ISOs and OpenVZ OS template caches for the AlmaLinux Beta and the RC-1 and have now rolled up a production ready BlueOnyx 5210R ISO using AlmaLinux 8.3.

It allows easy and trouble free installation of BlueOnyx 5210R on AlmaLinux 8.3 in the same way as any of our other ISO images.

OS template cache for Aventurin{e} 6109R and OpenVZ 7

Additionally our OpenVZ 7 and Aventurin{e} 6109R OS template cache ('blueonyx-5210R-x86_64') for BlueOnyx 5210R has been updated to switch it from CentOS 8 over to AlmaLinux 8.3. We chose to outright replace CentOS 8 with AlmaLinux 8 in the OS template cache to avoid naming conflicts. After all, it is a "blueonyx" template first and foremost and not really married to a specific OS.

If you already had the OS template cache 'blueonyx-5210R-x86_64' installed on Aventurin{e} 6109R, be sure to run a "yum update" to get the new version and then click on the button next to the 'blueonyx-5210R-x86_64' OS template cache shown in the image above. That will build a new version of the OS template cache for 5210R based on AlmaLinux 8.3. Once the cache has been built, the description will show that it's using AlmaLinux and no longer uses CentOS 8.

The BlueOnyx 5210R ISO image using AlmaLinux 8.3 can be found here and the updated OS template cache can easily be installed via "yum update" on Aventurin{e} 6109R. If you have a regular OpenVZ 7 without Aventurin{e} 6109R, then you can find the RPM for the 5210R OS template cache here.

CentOS 8 to AlmaLinux 8 conversion

Within the next week or two we will release a free and optional BlueOnyx 5210R PKG file on NewLinQ that will allow you to convert an existing BlueOnyx 5210R on CentOS 8 to a BlueOnyx 5210R that uses AlmaLinux 8 instead.

As CentOS 8 will eventually (31st December 2021) become 'CentOS stream' with most likely incompatible and unpredictable rolling releases we will eventually push an RPM to the BlueOnyx 5210R YUM repository that performs a mandatory conversion of BlueOnyx 5210R from CentOS 8 to AlmaLinux 8. In the same way that the PKG will soon allow you to voluntarily make that switch ahead of time. As there is no reason to remain on CentOS 8 until the lights literally go out this mandatory conversion to AlmaLinux 8 will happen sometime in summer or early fall of 2021. A more precise date for this mandatory switch will be published with sufficient advanced warning.

If you perform new BlueOnyx 5210R installs, please use the BlueOnyx 5210R ISO image based on AlmaLinux to avoid having to do a conversion from CentOS 8 to AlmaLinux 8 later on.

Follow-up: A script to convert CentOS 8 based BlueOnyx 5210R to AlmaLinux 8 is now included in BlueOnyx 5210R.