How to migrate from CentOS 8 to AlmaLinux

CentOS 8 Linux will be not supported by the end of the year 2021 and if you want to migrate it to AlmaLinux 8, follow the instructions below.

There is no standard release of CentOS 8+ Linux going forward and CentOS Stream continues after that date, serving as an upstream branch of Red Hat Enterprise Linux that seats between Fedora and RHEL.

AlmaLinux is an free and open source Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) fork developed by CloudLinux that is a great alternative to CentOS 8.

In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to migrate to AlmaLinux from CentOS 8 using “almalinux-deploy” script.

Prerequisites:

Make sure you have a backup of important data or applications. This allows you to restore the data if something goes wrong during the migration activity.

Updating the system

Install all the packages to the latest version by running the below commands.

$ sudo dnf update
$ sudo dnf upgrade

Make sure that you are running with the latest version of CentOS 8.3 by running the below command.

$ cat /etc/*-release

CentOS Linux release 8.4.2105
NAME="CentOS Linux"
VERSION="8"
ID="centos"
ID_LIKE="rhel fedora"
VERSION_ID="8"
PLATFORM_ID="platform:el8"
PRETTY_NAME="CentOS Linux 8"
ANSI_COLOR="0;31"
CPE_NAME="cpe:/o:centos:centos:8"
HOME_URL="https://centos.org/"
BUG_REPORT_URL="https://bugs.centos.org/"
CENTOS_MANTISBT_PROJECT="CentOS-8"
CENTOS_MANTISBT_PROJECT_VERSION="8"
CentOS Linux release 8.4.2105
CentOS Linux release 8.4.2105

Restart your system if you have installed any kernel patches:

$ sudo reboot

To download the AlmaLinux migration script, run:

$ curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/AlmaLinux/almalinux-deploy/master/almalinux-deploy.sh

Set execute permissions to the migration script using the chmod command as showing below:

$ chmod +x almalinux-deploy.sh

Starting Migration Process

Kick on the migration process using the following command. This bash script automates the migration process seamlessly. As part of this migration activity, it performs some system checks, then uninstall, reinstall and upgrade the necessary packages.

$ sudo bash almalinux-deploy.sh

Once the migration process has been completed, you should get the following output:

Restart your system to apply the changes:

$ sudo reboot

Post reboot of your system, you can find the AlmaLinux operating system version using the below command:

$ cat /etc/os-release

Run the following command to verify the loaded kernel version, which confirms that the Almalinux kernel is set to boot by default.

$ sudo grubby --info DEFAULT | grep AlmaLinux
title="AlmaLinux (4.18.0-305.12.1.el8_4.x86_64) 8.4 (Electric Cheetah)"

Closing Notes

In this guide, we’ve shown you how to migrate from CentOS 8.4 to AlmaLinux 8.4

If you have any questions or feedback, feel free to comment below.

About Magesh Maruthamuthu

Love to play with all Linux distribution

View all posts by Magesh Maruthamuthu

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