With the stable version of RHEL 9 expected to be released in May, AlmaLinux pushes its beta of version 9 out of the door and says it’s looking for testers.
On Tuesday, AlmaLinux announced in a blog the beta release of AlmaLinux OS 9.0, based on the upcoming release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9, which is expected to see its production ready official release in May. The official AlmaLinux 9.0 will be released shortly after the RHEL release.
The new AlmaLinux adds support for IBM Z systems alongside its existing support of x86 64, ARM 64, and POWER, which means it now supports all four of the architectures supported by RHEL. The project said that cloud images and containers are still in process, but that they anticipate the first batch to be ready in the next day or so.
With tongue-in-cheek, the Alma folks also want to make sure everyone knows that this is a beta release that should not be used for mission critical production workloads.
“The provided upgrade instructions should not be used on production machines unless you don’t mind if something breaks,” they said. “Now if you wanna test this somehow, somewhere to see how things will work in 9.0 stable, you’re on the right track.”
AlmaLinux 9.0 beta is based on upstream kernel version 5.14 and contains enhancements around cloud and container development, and improvements to the web console. This release also delivers enhancements for security and compliance, including additional security profiles. Other updates contained in this release include Python 3.9, GCC 11 with the latest versions of LLVM, Rust, and Go, to make modernizing the applications faster and easier.
Complete release notes are available on the AlmaLinux website.
The project also asks active community members to watch the project’s blog, community chat, social channels, and mailing lists for an upcoming announcement of test days, “where we will gather together and have ourselves a good old-fashioned bug hunt.”
In the meantime, the project is asking users with time and inclination to test the new beta release.
“Your feedback is what helps make great production releases,” they said. “Please report any bugs you may see on the Bug Tracker.
