For the computer geeks, some news about our server. What the heck is AlmaLinux?

[Foggy]

Because I have been notified that I have a certain amount of time to convert my Virtual Private Server from CentOS 7, which I know fairly well at this point, to this AlmaLinux beast, and since it will run my whole VPS, this applies not only to Fogbow, but all the websites I own.

So I reckon I need to install AlmaLinux on one of my old laptops and play with it for a while.

I started playing with Linux in 1994. In those days, you installed it with 3.5" floppies, which took half an hour to download over a phone line. And then the X-window interface wouldn't work half the time.

[neonzx]

Because I have been notified that I have a certain amount of time to convert my Virtual Private Server from CentOS 7, which I know fairly well at this point, to this AlmaLinux beast, and since it will run my whole VPS, this applies not only to Fogbow, but all the websites I own.

So I reckon I need to install AlmaLinux on one of my old laptops and play with it for a while.

I started playing with Linux in 1994. In those days, you installed it with 3.5" floppies.

Are they telling you they are gonna shut you off? Sure, maybe they aren''t going to support CentOS but if it is working fine... why change? You don't have to upgrade versions of stuff all the time. You stress too much on that sometimes.

And 3.5" floppies. Well, boss, those were in a hard shell plastic casing. Floppies were 5.25" (or 8" if you wanna go way back).

[Foggy]

Alma, of course, means "soul" in Spanish.

We're going to be a more soulful website, you betcha.

I have already downloaded an *.iso and will put it on one a my new 128 gigglebyte thumb drives.

And then we'll see ...

[pipistrelle]

Context:

AlmaLinux OS is an open-source, community-driven Linux operating system that fills the gap left by the discontinuation of the CentOS Linux stable release.

[Foggy]

And 3.5" floppies. Well, boss, those were in a hard shell plastic casing.

Which never stopped anyone from referring to them as floppies.

You can still buy 3.5" floppy disks on Amazon, if you care to. But they ARE floppies, so they are sold as "floppy disks".

At one point, I had hundreds of the damn things. I know what they were called.

[Foggy]

Yeah, pipistrelle. CentOS is going away, and AlmaLinux is the new thing.

It's Friday and I have other stuff to do, but I expect to be running AlmaLinux on one of my computers by the end of the day.

[neonzx]

And 3.5" floppies. Well, boss, those were in a hard shell plastic casing.

Which never stopped anyone from referring to them as floppies.

You can still buy 3.5" floppy disks on Amazon, if you care to. But they ARE floppies, so they are sold as "floppy disks".

At one point, I had hundreds of the damn things. I know what they were called.

Well, then. I never called them floppies. They were disks. But anywho...

My last two laptops came with no external media player device. (yes, I did get a new laptop a few months ago again because the last one was too slow).

What would the millennial children of today make of these ancient artifacts? Heck, what would they make of a CD music album?

[noblepa]

And 3.5" floppies. Well, boss, those were in a hard shell plastic casing.

Which never stopped anyone from referring to them as floppies.

Yes, but the actual recording media, the mylar disk inside the plastic casing was flexible, just like the older 5" or 8" floppy disks. The internal disk used inside the desktop or laptop computer has a rigid, usually aluminum, platter. Thus the moniker "hard drive".

BTW, a bit of trivia: IBM mainframe disk drives, for many years, were built using 14" platters, stacked 10-12 platters high, in a construct called a disk pack. Sometime in the early seventies, I believe, IBM developed a disk pack using much smaller platters and called it a "Diskette". They even trademarked the name. When floppy disks were invented, IBM released the name into the public domain, which allowed other manufacturers to use it, royalty free.

[noblepa]

And 3.5" floppies. Well, boss, those were in a hard shell plastic casing.

Which never stopped anyone from referring to them as floppies.

You can still buy 3.5" floppy disks on Amazon, if you care to. But they ARE floppies, so they are sold as "floppy disks".

At one point, I had hundreds of the damn things. I know what they were called.

Well, then. I never called them floppies. They were disks. But anywho...

My last two laptops came with no external media player device. (yes, I did get a new laptop a few months ago again because the last one was too slow).

What would the millennial children of today make of these ancient artifacts? Heck, what would they make of a CD music album?

I was rummaging through my desk at home the other day and I came across an 80-column tab card, colloquially referred to as an "IBM Card". Now, that's old.

[Foggy]

I believe I have stated several times, when I met ol' Wifehorn the second time (and married her), she owned a computer school for children. She had so many 3.5" floppies, we had literally hundreds and hundreds of them. In those days, that was how you installed software, even Windows 3.0. Plus all the children's software she had for teaching.

I don't think there's a single floppy disk anywhere in this house. But I'm not gonna look, I'm burning my new AlmaLinux onto a flash drive, like grownups do.

[tek]

This sort of experimenting is what VMs were made for...

[bill_g]

We called the three and a quarter discs floppies as well.

[RTH10260]

And 3.5" floppies. Well, boss, those were in a hard shell plastic casing.

Which never stopped anyone from referring to them as floppies.

You can still buy 3.5" floppy disks on Amazon, if you care to. But they ARE floppies, so they are sold as "floppy disks".

At one point, I had hundreds of the damn things. I know what they were called.

You can still buy those 3.5" from me, still factory wrapped.
I also have a stash of 8" single and double sided flopping media in the archive.
Also too nobody seems to want to burn CDs anymore, from the lowly 495MB ones to the better 4.5GB ones.
And the BlueRays, what happened to them - I have some never opened (partially cause my desktop with the burner soured on me)
Let's not foget the special coated CDs that would let one burn an image (b/w in the colour of the coating) as label, rather than attaching paper.

The transition to other storage media happened so fast

[RTH10260]

Because I have been notified that I have a certain amount of time to convert my Virtual Private Server from CentOS 7, which I know fairly well at this point, to this AlmaLinux beast, and since it will run my whole VPS, this applies not only to Fogbow, but all the websites I own.

PS what happened with the notion that on a VPS one can run anything that one wishes? Are they just discontinuing their support? I remember therer was some excitment around CenttOS cause it was a derivate of Red Hats Linux version and the did no longer supply updates for CentOS (might have to read up on that again).

[Foggy]

You can still buy those 3.5" from me, still factory wrapped.

... and I will need a computer that has an a:\ drive. I have many computers, but not one like that.

[RTH10260]

PS from the Google machine and the AlmaLinux website

https://almalinux.org/

An Open Source, community owned and governed, forever-free enterprise Linux distribution, focused on long-term stability, providing a robust production-grade platform. AlmaLinux OS is 1:1 binary compatible with RHEL® and pre-Stream CentOS.

Wikipedia entry:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlmaLinux

AlmaLinux is a free and open source Linux distribution, created originally by CloudLinux to provide a community-supported, production-grade enterprise operating system that is binary-compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). The first stable release of AlmaLinux was published on March 30, 2021,[1] and will be supported through March 1, 2029.[2]

History

On December 8, 2020, Red Hat announced that development of CentOS Linux, a free-of-cost downstream fork of the commercial Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), would be discontinued and its official support would be cut short to focus on CentOS Stream, a stable LTS release without minor releases officially used by Red Hat to preview what is intended for inclusion in updates to RHEL.[4][5][6]

In response, CloudLinux – which maintains its own commercial Linux distribution, CloudLinux OS – created AlmaLinux to provide a community-supported spiritual successor to CentOS Linux, aiming for binary-compatibility with the current version of RHEL.[7] A beta version of AlmaLinux was first released on February 1, 2021,[8] and the first stable release of AlmaLinux was published on March 30, 2021.[1] AlmaLinux 8.x will be supported until 2029.[7] Numerous companies, such as ARM, AWS, Equinix, and Microsoft, also support AlmaLinux.[9] On March 30, 2021, the AlmaLinux OS Foundation was created as a 501(c) organization to take over AlmaLinux development and governance from CloudLinux, which has promised $1 million in annual funding to the project.[10]

In September of 2022 the AlmaLinux OS Foundation held its first election,[11] announcing a board of 7 community-elected members on September 19th.[12]

On December 7th, 2022 it was announced that CERN and Fermilab would be providing AlmaLinux as the standard operating system for their experiments.[13]

Seems like sound longtime support will be available.

[RTH10260]

PPS. I am astonished that a hosting company would not go with one of the more established distributions.

Afterthought - maybe the similarity to CentOS gives them a headup on support.

and after multiple ETAs above: Looks like not many visible differences to CentOS.

[RTH10260]

AlmaLinux is source hosted at GitHub.

This link describes the migration procedure from CentOS:

https://github.com/AlmaLinux/almalinux-deploy

Scroll down past the directory to the document.

[Foggy]

Yabbut, no.

My hosting company isn't going to allow me to do this on my own. I'm going to have to do it within the confines of their system.

So, umm ... yeah. I could install CentOS7 on an old laptop (I did that many many moons ago) and then migrate it to AlmaLinux, and I will have learned exactly nothing relevant, because that's not how I have to do it on my hosting company's server. On their server, you click the button that says "Click here" and it does the migration for you. I don't have to learn how to do that, and I don't want to learn how to do that.

All I really want is a copy on a local home computer so I can play around with it. Then if I learn it well enough, I will have the confidence that when I do go to the hosting company and click the "Click here" button, I can operate the new OS to some degree, the way I can with CentOS7.

And I don't need the Git repository, because all you need to install the OS is the *.iso file, which is widely distributed.

However, both my old laptops are too old to install this thing. I'm going to have to look at dual boot on one of the newer machines.

[tek]

if your new iron has enough memory and has virtualization enabled, you can fire up virtualbox and do all this in a VM.

d-1.jpg (96.35 KiB) Viewed 647 times

I have stacks and stacks of VMs laying around.. 37 on a quick count on this one system (obvs not all up at once)
I have an external drive with my VMs on my laptop, so I don't have to clog up the main disk.

[Phoenix520]

I worked at a company called MicroCompter Accessories in the mid-80s. I had a Compaq Portable for working at home on weekends. It was the size of a large suitcase and took 8” floppies.

I hated that thing. It really needed 2 to carry it but it wasn’t set up for that. The keyboard was too slow for my typing speed.

[neonzx]

I worked at a company called MicroCompter Accessories in the mid-80s. I had a Compaq Portable for working at home on weekends. It was the size of a large suitcase and took 8” floppies.

I hated that thing. It really needed 2 to carry it but it wasn’t set up for that. The keyboard was too slow for my typing speed.

Ugh oh. Careful, I think you may be disclosing your age.

Now tell me about punch-cards

[Foggy]

Wait, neonzx's punchcard has the nuclear codes for taking out Moscow.



It's Friday. Been fighting computers all week and part of last week. And winning, of course. As y'all know, I am an ordained minister, and part of my ministry is, Never Let The Computer Win, or you get Skynet and all that nonsense.

But I can still read a punchcard!

[Foggy]

This link describes the migration procedure from CentOS:

https://github.com/AlmaLinux/almalinux-deploy

I looked at that, but it only addresses migration from CentOS 8, not CentOS 7.

A lot of people thought 7 was better than 8, and for example, the server that runs Fogbow and my other sites is CentOS 7, and I'm pretty sure they're not planning to upgrade to CentOS 8 and then migrate to AlmaLinux.

And because my server runs CentOS 7, my old laptop here has CentOS 7 installed on it. That way, like I said, I have a computer I can use to practice before I do anything completely crazy on a working server.

I have all year and into 2024 before they finally force me to make the change. So I have plenty of time to figure it out.

[Foggy]

if your new iron has enough memory and has virtualization enabled, you can fire up virtualbox and do all this in a VM.

That's an excellent idea, and I will work on that a little.

I have stacks and stacks of VMs laying around.. 37 on a quick count on this one system (obvs not all up at once)
I have an external drive with my VMs on my laptop, so I don't have to clog up the main disk.

I took a look at VMs once, and you have to have the installation media for each OS that you want to use as a VM, isn't that right? So, like, I have a CD with a bootleg copy of Windows 2000 on it, and the passkey to unlock it, and if I could ever think of a reason why I would want to run Windows 2000 again, well then by golly I think I could do that in a virtual machine.

But where the hell do you find 37 operating systems and the keys to unlock them?

Seriously, how do you use them? What do you do with them?