 Today, I'm going to be taking a look at a Linux distribution that I've actually never tried before. I'm going to be doing a quick first look at Alma Linux. Alma Linux is based on Redhead and Fedora, at least according to the Distro Watch page. Alma Linux, you can think of it as being kind of like a successor to Sentos. So Sentos is no longer developed, or at least it's not what it was. They kind of abandoned Sentos as a project what a year or two ago. And there have been some Linux distributions that are trying to fill that void. One of them Rocky Linux, another distribution I've never tried, and Alma Linux, which is I'm going to take a look at today. The reason I typically don't take a look at these Redhead-based Linux distributions is because obviously I don't work in IT or system administration. So these are not the kind of distributions I would ever need to use, you know, like on my main production machines here for what I do. It's just a normal Linux desktop user. But I know many of the people that do watch some of my content, many of you guys, work in those industries and often have to deal with, you know, Redhead as a distribution or Redhead-compatible distributions such as Alma Linux. So I'm going to go ahead and grab an ISO and I'm going to run through a quick installation here inside a virtual machine. So let me go over to my browser here. And on the Alma Linux website, if I go to downloads and navigate to where they have their ISOs, it's very similar to how Sentos did things. They have three different ISOs. You have a boot ISO, you have a DVD ISO, and you have a minimal ISO. So what the boot ISO is, that's mainly if you need like a rescue ISO, right? That's mainly to rescue systems. Now the other two ISOs, minimal and DVD minimal is just a base system, very minimal, right? It doesn't come with everything. That ISO is only 1.5 gigs in size. So that's actually what I'm going to install. The DVD ISO includes everything possible, basically, on the ISO. The DVD ISO is 8 gigs. That is massive. I really don't want to wait for 8 gigs of stuff to download for that ISO. Plus, I'm not going to take a look at every single possible thing that would be on the ISO anyway, so I'm going to do the minimal ISO. And I'm just going to install the programs that I want to play with as I decide that I want to install them. So let me switch over to this virtual machine here, and this is AlmaLinux 9.0. So this was just released, I want to say, about a week ago. And I'm going to go ahead and run through a quick installation, so I'm going to install AlmaLinux. And being based on Red Hat, I would expect it to be using the standard Anaconda installer, which is an install program that I've always had issues with. But because I just recently ran through an installation of Fedora, I think I'm going to be okay with it this time. My problem is I make mistakes with it every time I install Fedora, because I only install Fedora once or twice a year in something as many months in between doing those installations. So first, we need to choose our language. The language for me is English and English US, so that is correct. So I'm just going to click Continue here. Let me move my head out of the ways. You guys can see the buttons here at the bottom. So we've set keyboard to English US, language support defaults to English US, probably because we chose English US for the keyboard, time and date. It correctly chose the central time zone in the US for me, so I don't have to change any of this. So that's very nice. The installation source is local media. Software selection is the minimal install. That's what I want. Now, the partitioning is the one that always gets me a little confused here, because by default, I always think I have to select the disk. But I don't think that looks like it's selected, right? Because it turns blue. I would think that is selecting the disk, but no, it was actually selected before I ever. So that's how I always mess this up. And I'm not going to remember that. And nine months when I installed the next version of Fedora, I know I'm not going to remember that because I've never remembered it. In 15 years of using Linux, I have never, because I mean, just the way that highlights when you click it the first time, that's just strange. Anyway, I'm going to go ahead. I'm not going to encrypt my debt. I'm just going to click done for networking. I'm using Ethernet. Looks like it's connected. Just fine. Now let's go ahead and set a root password. So let me create a strong and complicated root password and then confirm that strong and complicated password. You also have options of locking the root account. I want the root account, the root user to be available. So I'm not going to tick that on and then allow root SSH login with password. Typically, I'd like to disable root SSH logins. So I'm going to leave that ticked off as well. Let me click done. And this is another really bad part of the Anaconda installer. It doesn't make any sense. So it says my password is too short, but the done button is here. The too short message is here. And then the press done twice to basically use the password anyway. So to ignore the warning is way down here at the bottom. So you get three different messages and three different parts of the window, nowhere close to each other. Most people are going to be clicking done and having no idea why that's not working because they're never going to see the bottom of the screen. And now user creation. Let's go ahead and create the DT user. I'm going to call my user DT. Let's create a strong and complicated password for the DT user and confirm that password and then click done again. And then once again, we get a warning at the bottom that most people are never going to see I'm going to click done again and then begin installation. And now I'm just going to let the installation run. That's probably is going to take five or 10 minutes. I'll be back once this portion of the installer completes. And while that installation completes, I do want to go back to the browser just for a second because I do want to call to attention on the All Malinux website. They have this message here introducing Elevate Project. So the Elevate Project, what this is, is a way for you to migrate your Red Hat or Red Hat derivative based distributions to All Malinux. So that's actually really neat. And you can read more about the Elevate Project here on the All Malinux wiki. It looks like you can migrate from Synthos over to Almalinux 8. Of course, now we're on Almalinux 9. You can also move from Synthos to Eurolinux to Rockylinux to Oraclelinux. Let me get back into the virtual machine because it does look like that portion of the installer has completed. So let me move my head so you guys can see reboot system. That's what I'm going to do right now. When our system has rebooted and you see on the minimal installation, all we get is the TTY. So let's go ahead and log in. So my user was DT and then let's go ahead and log in as the DT user. Now this might be a situation where downloading the 8GB DVD ISO rather than the 1.5GB minimal ISO may be advantageous to some people because I saved a lot of time not having to download that gigantic ISO, but I don't know if the DVD ISO would have actually installed a graphical environment or not. Maybe not. But what I'm going to do now is let's see what package manager they're using. Are they going old school with YUM? YUM is available. Let me also, I'm going to do where is DNF to see if DNF is installed. Okay. So we have both options here. So let me see if our DT user is part of the sudoers group. So I'm going to do a sudo dnf and let's just do upgrade just to see if this actually works. It does not, which I kind of expected because DT is not in the sudoers group. So let's su, let's move over to the root user. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to vi sudo. What vi sudo does, it opens typically with vi, the vi editor, your slash etsy slash sudoers file. And I am going to go down toward the bottom of this file. And I am going to find the wheel group here. It looks like anybody that's part of the wheel group is allowed to use sudo. So actually I don't need to edit anything in that file. All I need to do is add DT to the wheel group. And the way this is done on Linux is typically with the user mod command. So user mod all one word space dash lowercase a capital G. So we're going to add a user to a group and the group is going to be the wheel group and space. And then lastly, the user that we're modding, the user is DT. And now that we've done that, if I su back to the DT user, now let me sudo dnf upgrade just to see if we have sudo privileges now. And we do. We're about to do an upgrade here. This may take a couple of minutes. Let me go ahead and click why for yes. Since this was released about a week ago, I'm going to go ahead and take the update. Looks like that was very quick. Probably because really nothing is installed. I mean, we don't even have a graphical environment installed, right? So there wasn't very much. There certainly no big programs that had to update there. Now I actually had to dig through some of the all millennics documentation to, you know, because how do I want to get a graphical environment? Because I know they do come with their own, you know, GNOME desktop. But how do you install it, you know, package names or whatever? Well, they have these things in groups, groups of packages like these meta packages. And how you would do this is either with YUM or with DNF. I'm going to use a DNF, DNF group list that should give us a list of all the groups that are available for us to install. And now you can see we have various groups to choose from. And we have available environment groups. And then under that you see server with GUI. And then you also have server, I guess without a GUI, workstation, virtualization host, custom operating system, and then, you know, various other things like RPM development environment dot net environment, yada, yada, yada. Now not being in IT or system administration or anything like that. I'm going to go very, very basic here. So I'm going to do sudo dnf group install, all one word, because this is not an installation of a single package. It's a group installation. So sudo dnf group install. And then you need to do inside quotes here of the group names because they have spaces in them. And I'm going to do server with GUI just because I know for sure that one is going to come with x11 and a desktop environment, you know, it will actually give us something that we can actually log in to and actually look around that way. We don't have to play at the command line, although I'm fine with it. For those of you watching this video about all my Linux, you know, there's only so much I can show you at the command line, right? Because the command line, the show, basically the same one, all Linux distribution. So how does all my Linux really differentiate itself from the rest of the crowd? Now, this installation of server with GUI is going to take a long time because it's installing 825 packages, which is understandable because the base installation really didn't install anything, right? So we've got to install looks like the full xorg server. It's going to have to install the, uh, the GNOME desktop environment and the full GNOME suite of applications. It's going to have to install themes and icons and fonts. It's probably going to give us, you know, some basic software to work with. We're going to need, of course, a terminal emulator and we're going to need a web browser, things like that. So I'm assuming it's going to give us everything we need to actually log in and actually get some work done. So the server with GUI meta package finished installing. That took about five minutes and, you know, I might be able to reboot and get to GDM, which is GNOME's login manager. But typically on minimal Linux installations, you have to enable your login manager as a service with system D. So I'm actually going to double check and make sure that GDM is actually enabled before I reboot just to make sure. So I'm going to run sudo system CTL, set dash default space and then graphical dot target. It's going to ask for a root password and it's complaining that system CTL that I misspelled it, which I did. I added two s's and, okay, and now it created a sim link. So let's reboot and see what we get. And it reboots just fine. You can see our username DT and let me go ahead and choose DT as the user. I'm going to move my head out of the way. I'm going to check this cog wheel before I log in because by default, it's going to default to Wayland. Wayland can be kind of flaky, especially in these VMs. So just to make sure things work as expected, I'm going to do standard X11 display server instead of standard Wayland display server. And now I'm going to log in. And of course, we get our standard GNOME desktop environment here. Let me go ahead and hit the super key, go to display and let's change the display resolution to 1920 by 1080 is the resolution I use on my monitors and keep changes. And now this VM is set up to where every time I log in, it will remember 1920 by 1080. I just very quickly, I just want to see the default applications that are installed because we did the server with GUI installation. What is it actually installed? It looks like it just installs like the base GNOME suite of applications. So GNOME videos, calculator, text editor is g edit. The GNOME system monitor, we have cheese, which is our webcam, various utilities and the subgroup here, which is our distool image viewer, document viewer, the screenshot tool. Really, that's it. Is that seriously everything here? What about a browser? Do we have one Firefox? OK, I was wondering if they installed epiphany, which is GNOME's web browser. If they gave us something better, it looks like they made the sensible choice and actually gave us a proper web browser. In this case, Firefox. Let's check the version here. I go to help and about Firefox. This is Firefox 91.9.1 ESR. So ESR is the extended support release of Firefox. You can think of it as kind of like a long term support release. And that really is everything that is installed. If I do the super key, go to the menu. Now, here's the pinned applications. Firefox was a pinned applications. That's why it wasn't in the menu. And of course, we have the Nautilus file manager here as well with those hideous old school beige icons. Those are so bad. We have our help and we have software, the GNOME software center here, which I'm not going to install any more software, but I will launch it. And that's it. You know, very, very minimal out of the box, right? Not much to this thing. And of course, you know, a distribution like all my Linux being a successor to something like CentOS, you know, being based on Red Hat, being in the same league as things like Rocky Linux or the no longer maintained scientific Linux. All these rail based distributions, they're really meant for enterprise use. Many of them are really meant for server use. So they're not really meant for normal people like you and me desktop Linux users. I'm not going to really do anything else with this. I will say, though, for those of you looking for server related information, the Alma Linux Wiki does have some how to guide, some installation guides on how you can install things like Foreman, PHP, My Admin, Apache, Direct Admin, Redis, Mongo, Caddy, OpenSSL, WordPress and WordPress with Nginx, PHP, H.1 and Maria database and Java, some virtualization stuff. Here's got documentation about Docker. They even got some information here about Raspberry Pi's enabling SSH 2 factor authentication, you know, a lot of security and server related stuff. So I do appreciate that they have some documentation here on the website. I will say it's not a lot of documentation for a big project, which I know it's still new. It hasn't been up and running that long. I will say the Wiki is pretty small. It really needs a lot more contributors, you know, contributing documentation. But I'm really happy that Alma Linux exists because a lot of people were really concerned when CentOS died, essentially, because CentOS was one of the most popular Linux distributions in the world, especially on servers. It wasn't a desktop distribution. It was mainly for server use. It was basically your free version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. And when CentOS went away, people were really concerned that they wouldn't have that Red Hat based distribution that they could use without it actually being Red Hat. And Alma Linux provides that. And of course, once again, you do have the migration path with their Elevate project, you have the migrate button right here on the home page, which goes to Alma Linux, dash deploy a GitHub. And you can see you can convert your EL8. I'm assuming that's the Elevate project eight operating system. So anything compatible with the Elevate project, you can convert to Alma Linux doing the following a sudo dnf update dash y and then a reboot. Yada, yada, yada. So that was just a very quick installation. And first look at Alma Linux. Again, I'm not in system administration. I'm not in it. It's a server distribution, really server slash enterprise kind of distribution. It's not something I would use in my personal life and professionally. I don't have a profession that will require something like this distribution. That's why I really don't give these Red Hat and Red Hat based distributions any time on the channel is just not something I work with. But people had asked me to take a look at this new distribution, Alma Linux, that hadn't been around that long. And I'm kind of glad I did because I do think, especially with the death of Sentos, you know, we people are craving a Sentos alternative. And I'm really happy that this exists. And I hope by me just doing this quick video that all my Linux gets some more love from from you guys in the community that maybe want to use it or maybe want to contribute to it. Because again, it's a young project. I'm sure they could use more developers, certainly more people working on documentation. So I do want to congratulate the Alma Linux team on a job well done on the most recent release, Alma Linux 9.0. Now, before I go, I need to thank a few special people. I need to thank the producers of this episode. I'm talking about the following people. Devin, Dustin, Gabe, James, Maxim, Matt, Michael, Mitchell, Paul, Scott, Wes, why are you bald? Homie, Alan, Armored, Dragon, Chuck, Commander, Angry, Diokai, Dylan, George, Lee, Linux, Ninja, Mars, Drum, Migra, Yon, Alexander, P's, Archim, Adore, Polytech, Realiteats for less red profits, Stephen and Willie, these guys. They're my high steered patrons over on Patreon without these guys. This quick look at all my Linux would not have been possible. The show is also brought to you by each and every one of these fine ladies and gentlemen, all these names you're seeing on the screen. These are all my supporters over on Patreon because I'm sponsored by you guys, the community. If you want to see more videos about Linux, free software, open source software and just nerdy stuff in general. Subscribe to DistroTube over on Patreon. Peace, guys. Why does GNOME still use those poopy colored icons?