The lift and shift app, ELevate, for easily migrating away from no longer supported distros, adds Scientific Linux support as well as new features.
Chart showing possible migration paths using ELevate. Source: AlmaLinux Foundation
The AlmaLiniux OS Foundation announced this morning that its ELevate app now supports Scientific Linux 7, which means that those still using the no longer supported Linux distribution now have an easy migration path. This comes about four months after support for CentOS Linux 6 was added, which means the app’s developers pretty much now have all bases covered for helping users stuck on one of the no-long-being-maintained clones of Red Hat Enterprise Linux migrate to another RHEL clone that’s still supported.
Both CentOS Linux and Scientific Linux no longer exist as distros, meaning that without the help of an app such as ELevate there’s no easy or obvious upgrade path. Now there is.
The addition of Scientific Linux isn’t the only improvement to ELevate being unveiled today, however. For starters, the app can now be used to migrate from CentOS Stream 8 to CentOS Steam9, which is something that’s been in the works for a while.
In addition, ELevate now comes with expanded repository support, which includes EPEL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL, Imunify, and KernelCare; and it will also now automatically scan and alert for hardware that isn’t supported in the destination operating system — which will save a lot of headaches when unsupported hardware is found.
The latter is doubly important because versions 8.10 and 9.4 of AlmaLinux now include hardware support for more than 150 storage and network devices that have been disabled in RHEL and the clones that duplicate RHEL exactly. AlmaLinux is able to do this because it no longer promises to be a line-by-line copy of RHEL.
“It’s exciting to help simplify the upgrade process for users facing difficult updates on otherwise languishing devices,” Andrew Lukoshko, AlmaLinux’s lead architect and a member of the AlmaLinux Engineering Steering Committee, said in a statement. “These latest ELevate improvements also play an important role in ensuring overall online safety.”
Inside ELevate
ELevate is an app developed by AlmaLinux and its founding company CloudLinux, for lifting and shifting one version of a number of RHEL clones to another. It’s based on LEAPP, an open source command line migration tool originally developed by Red Hat, and a data library called leapp-data. The combination allows users to upgrade in-place from an unsupported operating system to a modern operating system, meaning the users choice of supported RHEL clones based on RHEL7, and then from there to version 8 to 9 of that distro.
The added support for Scientific Linux is a bit different than ELevate’s support of other distros, as the app can currently only upgrade it to AlmaLinux 7, which might seem to be force-feeding AlmaLinux on its users. That’s not the case, according to benny Vasquez, the AlmaLinux Foundation’s chairperson.
“Scientific Linux 7 support is limited to upgrading to AlmaLinux because the folks who asked for it were only looking to go to AlmaLinux, but if there’s demand for other distributions we’d be happy to help expand that support as well,” she told FOSS Force.
This goes along with what I know about the AlmaLinux community and the ELevate project. Although ELevate was developed by and is hosted by the AlmaLinux community, it’s never been limited to AlmaLinux but supports most of the major distros in Enterprise Linux space. Except for Scientific Linux, the app supports the migration to versions 8 and 9 of AlmaLinux, EuroLinux, Rocky Linux, and CentOS Stream. Users wishing to migrate from Oracle Linux 8 to Oracle Linux 9 need to use the Oracle Leapp utility.
Both the LEAPP scripts and leapp-data are open for contribution and hosted in the AlmaLinux GitHub project. Development, documentation, testing, demos, and support are just some of the ways the AlmaLinux community contributes to the success of the ELevate project. More information on ELevate is available on the AlmaLinux website.
Editor’s note: An earlier version of this article said that ELevate can’t be used to migrate from CentOS Stream 8 to CentOS Stream 9, which is one of the issues fixed with this release.
Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux
This is pretty cool. I liked Scientific Linux when it came out and was saddened when its support was dropped. I can imagine that some of the users would stay in place and find themselves stuck with older hardware over time, but switching to a newer distribution would be time consuming.
This is pretty cool. I liked Scientific Linux when it came out and was saddened when its support was dropped. I can imagine that some of the users would stay in place and find themselves stuck with older hardware over time, but switching to a newer distribution would be time consuming.