With RHEL 10 likely to be released within the next 60 days or so, users of AlmaLinux, Rocky Linux, and other Red Hat clones are on notice to prepare to upgrade.
With the release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 just around the corner, there are lots of folks preparing to upgrade to AlmaLinux 10, which will likely become available within a day of RHEL’s new release. Since AlmaLinux’s first release about three years ago, it’s been the first Enterprise clone to issue a new release after a new version of RHEL.
That means that many AlmaLinux users will be depending on the distro’s ELevate software to easily lift and shift v9 installations to v10.
This has kept some AlmaLinux devs busy readying ELevate for the upcoming week or two when it’ll be some sysadmins’ best friend — until it’s done its job and gets retired until after RHEL’s next upgrade.
On Thursday, ELevate project engineer Yuriy Kohut announced that the project’s developers are calling for some in-the-wild testers — that is, AlmaLinux users who will be needing to perform big upgrades once v10 is released — to help ELevate find and fix bugs now, ahead of the game, instead of when the eleventh hour arrives for real.
“We welcome the community to help us test these new upgrade paths and share their experiences,” Kohut announced. “Your input will directly contribute to the quality and development of the final release.”
How ELevate Upgrades Work
As you might imagine, the folks at AlmaLinux — and therefore ELevate — don’t leave these sorts of things open to chance and so have everything well thought out.
According to Kohut, these days the ELevate Project uses a three-stage process for delivering updates:
- New upgrade paths, features, bug fixes, and new versions of leapp-repository and leapp-data are first introduced in ELevate NG. The AlmaLinux Team, along with the community, tests these enhancements.
- ELevate NG then moves to general Testing, during which it gathers additional data, features, and improvements.
- Once these updates are thoroughly tested and approved, the AlmaLinux Team releases them to ELevate Stable.”
ELevate NG — for “next generation” — is something of an experimental ELevate release created for readying for a new update path. It’s here that new changes and the like are introduced. ELevate Testing, while more mature than NG, is still basically experimental. It’s where new changes are tested and fully integrated, which makes it somewhat akin to a release candidate.
And if you’re wondering about the “leapp” references, Leapp is an open-source upgrade tool initially developed by Red Hat, which serves as ELevate’s backbone.
Before Getting Started
If you want to be a tester, there are a few other things you should know before jumping in. For starters, you’re going to need an upgrade path, especially since AlmaLinux 10, the upgrade for which you’ll be testing, doesn’t exist yet. That’s no problem, because the thoughtful folks at AlmaLinux have come up with some upgrade paths for you to use:
- AlmaLinux OS 9 to AlmaLinux 10.0 beta.
- CentOS Stream 9 to CentOS Stream 10
- ELevate NG to AlmaLinux Kitten 10
You should note that the first two of these upgrade paths are for testing purposes only and are not intended for production environments. After AlmaLinux 10.0 Stable is released, these paths will be updated for ELevate Stable.
Oh, and here’s some good news for testers: those AlmaLinux 9 installs you update to AlmaLinux 10 beta for testing will become legitimately production ready AlmaLinux 10 machines the first time you update them after the release of AlmaLinux 10.
The third upgrade path — to AlmaLinux Kitten — was only added recently, based on community requests. Kitten is AlmaLinux’s clone of CentOS Stream for testing and developmental purposes.
Ready to Test?
If you’re an AlmaLinux user, especially if you have multiple installations, testing at this point is something of a win-win proposition, because you’re not only helping AlmaLinux get ready to be there when moving day comes, you’re also preparing yourself for the day when the upgrade will be “for real” instead of “only a test.”
Detailed testing instructions are available at Elevate Testing and ELevate NG. Bugs should be reported to the ELevate leapp repository.
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
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