The best thing about open source, and one of the reasons why I love the entire Linux ecosystem, is choice. With open source software you have the ability to choose what OS or software you run, how you run it, and what you can do with it. If you don’t like the decisions that have been made, or you want to do things in a different way, you have total freedom to do something about it or find an alternative.
And I think vendor lock-in can be really bad for innovation, and of freedom. One of my long-time goals has always been to build my own Linux distribution, not to compete with anyone or because I think I can do things any better, but really just for choice. To say I can, to gain the skills to be able to do it, and if anything should ever happen to the software I use, I can do something about it.
AlmaLinux is an entirely free, community driven Enterprise Linux distribution, binary-compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux, that started life to fill a gap when CentOS Linux was discontinued. I’m personally a big fan of the Red Hat Linux, and Red Hat “alike”, range of products. Red Hat Linux 7.3 was the first Linux distribution I ever used and I’ve mostly run Fedora or CentOS on my personal machines ever since.
I really like the path that AlmaLinux chose to take with it’s distribution. I think the Linux world needs a community Enterprise OS, I think the changes to CentOS, CentOS Stream and Red Hat Enterprise Linux do make sense, and I think it’s important to try to work together cooperatively. Linux started life as a cooperative project, open source developers and companies like Red Hat have both made Linux into what it is today.
In this article I wanted to demonstrate converting from Red Hat Enterprise Linux to AlmaLinux. In a previous post I wrote about converting from an alternative Enterprise Linux (Oracle Linux) to Red Hat, so in the spirit of sharing and freedom of choice, I thought I’d go the opposite direction this time.
Just to be clear, this is not a comment either way about Red Hat or any of the alternative Enterprise Linux distributions. I’m not trying to say one is better than the other, or you should pick one instead of another one. I actually really value having the ability to choose. Red Hat make a fantastic product, upstream Fedora Linux built by the open source community is a fantastic distribution and the one I run on my personal machine, all of the CentOS/RHEL binary compatible forks or downstream distributions are excellent as well in my opinion.
So I’m starting with a fresh Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 server running in Proxmox. I installed this machine from an ISO I downloaded from Red Hat and it’s registered with my developer subscription, which I did during the install.
For the sake of it, I’ve also got an Apache web server running.
AlmaLinux have provided a migration script, as most of the Enterprise Linux distributions have, to convert from one distribution to another, similar to the Convert2RHEL tool from Red Hat.
Download the script from Github, and run it.
$ curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/AlmaLinux/almalinux-deploy/master/almalinux-deploy.sh
$ sudo bash almalinux-deploy.shRunning the script shows that the migration is supported, and it starts doing its thing.
The migration took about the length of time it took me to make a coffee and some toast, though admittedly this is a small server with no real data or applications running, so your mileage may vary. Still it was quite quick and painless.
Rebooting the server shows everything seemed to work correctly.
