Yes, one of the founders of Rocky was one of the founders of Centos, I believe, but by heritage, they are a completely new organisation starting from scratch including building a complete hardware infrastructure. Alma, or at least its related/parent product, CloudLinux, has been going for over 10 years.

I presume everyone who is looking is aware of Oracle Linux. Personally, I believe their history with free products is not so good.

The kernel version is more than directly related. It is the same. We (ClearOS/Centos/Redhat and probably other RH clones) all use the same kernel.

Thanks for the confirmation.

Rocky is not yet out and has no heritage.

I think Rocky has just been released: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/06/centos-replacement-distro-rocky-linuxs-first-general-release-is-out/

In terms of heritage, I thought one of the fouding members of CentOS started Rocky linux.

From my own personal opinion, I am not sure what having two clones, Alma and Rocky bring to the party and what their differentiators may be.

Agreed. Makes it hard to choose. I'm also going to throw another distribution in the mix, although I don't know how suitable it is as a candidate: Oracle Linux?

The ISO has now been released.

The kernel version is more than directly related. It is the same. We (ClearOS/Centos/Redhat and probably other RH clones) all use the same kernel.

Re ClearOS 8 the debate is slowly happening. It won't use Centos Stream. Rocky is not yet out and has no heritage. AlmaLinux has been out for a while and has its origins in CloudLinux which has been around for 10 years or so and is probably a better candidate.

From my own personal opinion, I am not sure what having two clones, Alma and Rocky bring to the party and what their differentiators may be.

Thanks for that.

On a related note. Is the kernel version closely/directly related to the kernel version provided by CentOS 7?

If so, what is ClearOS' strategy with regards to RedHat shuttering CentOS 8?

Will the next version of ClearOS be based on Rocky/Alma Linux?

Nick Howitt wrote:

In this case it may be the same. The ISO is never newer than the live updates but can be the same. If you're on Community you should be receiving another update just about now, making Community ahead of the iso. The iso is just a snapshot of the released packages at a particular point in time. The key thing with 7.9 kernel was that it went to 3.10.0-1160. The bit after that will keep changing through the life of 7.9 and, if I were to create an iso in a few weeks time it would have the kernel from that point in time.

In this case it may be the same. The ISO is never newer than the live updates but can be the same. If you're on Community you should be receiving another update just about now, making Community ahead of the iso. The iso is just a snapshot of the released packages at a particular point in time. The key thing with 7.9 kernel was that it went to 3.10.0-1160. The bit after that will keep changing through the life of 7.9 and, if I were to create an iso in a few weeks time it would have the kernel from that point in time.

Hi Nick,

I'm on the rolling updates. I'm on ClearOS v7.9.1 and I can see that my Linux kernel version is: 3.10.0-1160.25.1.el7.x86_64

Is that the same kernel version as what's in the ISO for 7.9? I assume that it's the case.

I forgot to report this but I installed one server with this new ISO and everything went fine.

Okay, thanks for explaining.

Clearos-release has been updated as the one packaged in the last iso did not allow yum or the marketplace to work as it seems to load and run its post-install script before the yum rpm is installed. This means incompatible yum settings were being left on the installation.This is not a problem with existing installations, just new ones from the last 7.9 iso.

[edit]
See the last 7.9 iso thread for the issue
[/edit]

Hi Nick,

What is the reason for this new ISO?