AlmaLinux 10 released (BlueOnyx 5212R development has started)

The AlmaLinux team just announced the immediate release of AlmaLinux 10.

For more information on that see here and here.

The great part:

RedHat with RHEL10 chose to feature lock the latest EL10 behind the x86-64-v3 micro-architecture feature level. But the AlmaLinux guys decided to continue offering x86-64-v2 support.

Meaning: RHEL10 will only run on servers with newer CPUs that have the AVX, AVX2, and SSE4.2 instruction sets.

Whereas AlmaLinux 10 will run even on older gear such as Intel Nehalem (1st-gen Core i-series: i7-900, Xeon 5500 series), Intel Silvermont, AMD Bulldozer and Jaguar CPUs.

Which is great, as most of my servers would not be able to run EL10 otherwise. \o/

BlueOnyx 5212R development:

With the base OS now locked in as AlmaLinux 10 (stable) the development of BlueOnyx 5212R can begin in earnest. Some preliminary work had already started in last December when the EL10 betas came out. But these Betas are always so bare that real development work on them is futile and an exercise in frustration. Hence: This time we waited for the stable release to do the heavy lifting more efficiently.

How long will it take until 5212R will be available?

Hard to say. The TL;DR version certainly is: When I'm done.

The good thing is: It won't be THAT long. The GUI already supports the PHP version that EL10 ships with. That was one of the preparations carried out in December last year.

Aside from one new killer-feature that I'll announce in the next few days there will be nothing in 5212R that you don't already have available in 5211R or 5210R. At least as far as the general webhosting, email, DNS and so on goes. And that one new feature? All supported BlueOnyx versions will get it.

So the development of 5212R boils down to building roughly 1800 RPMs. Some dependencies aren't available for EL10 on EPEL or other repositories yet, so I'll have to build these from scratch from the latest sources, find compatible SRPMs that will build on EL10 or can be made to build on EL10. And once all the dependencies are sorted, I can populate the 5212R DNF repositories with the BlueOnyx RPMs and testing for loose ends and broken bits and pieces can begin.

One key difference that 5212R will have: No more Sendmail. It has been deprecated for good and BlueOnyx already uses Postfix as default. We will however still retain the somewhat awkward way how we build the Postfix configuration. Means: The GUI will still write out a Sendmail config (even if Sendmail is absent) and Postfix will import that on restarts to auto-generate a Postfix configuration.

If hard pressed for a release date of 5212R? Then my guess would be: Two months - give or take a little. I could probably do it in under a month, but 5211R still has so much life in it that there is no need to rush.

Aventurin{e} for BlueOnyx 5212R?

YES.

And that will be no big deal to roll up. The GUI will work out of the box and it's just rolling up Incus for EL10 and the couple of dependencies (OVS, QEMU and a few other odds and sods) that need to be provided for it to run. And for a pretty long time it'll make no difference if you use EL9 or EL10 as base OS to run Incus CTs (or VMs).

Want to help?

As usual: Rolling up a major version of BlueOnyx is quite an undertaking. A little contribution always goes a long way towards our motivation and if you can? Please consider a donation to the BlueOnyx project or a purchase in the BlueOnyx shop.

Many thanks!