~Toughbooktalk~

Hello,

My new project is installing AlmaLinux OS on a CF-31 MK4. Why? I have a few reasons. Mostly, I wanted to have an rpm-based OS like I use at work, to play around with at home for a change. I've been a staunch Debian user for many years.

At the office I use mostly Cloudinux which is a resource (LVE) and filesystem (CageFS) isolation system which is best suited for multi-user hosting. It ran on top of CentOS, based on RedHat.

The CentOS 8 project is dead. Its developer started RockyLinux as a successor. The rest of the project maintainers started CentOS Stream

Cloudlinux started AlmaLinux as its own replacement to CentOS which will have proper CloudLinux support. As it happens, they made a few versions with desktop environments, so I get to try it out with all the trappings of a standard window manager and tools, like XFCE4. They also have Gnome and KDE versions. So far I was pleasantly surprised as it mostly works fine but as just about every distro out there, it has its share of quirks.

Screen dimming hotkeys and wifi are the usual suspects that need to get worked on. Wifi just needs you to plugin in ethernet and run yum install iwl6000g2n-firmware.noarch to get that up and running. The rest of the little niggling things like no Network Manager applet and tablet calibration util probably have to do more with the XFCE4 version I chose to install. But yeah, the tablet itself was immediately running.

I'll post more when I have the time.

Hey Nic, I tried out Alma w/the Gnome DE on a live usb stick. I turned on wireless networking, by way of the menu that shows when you click on the icons that are on the right end of the top bar, entered my access point info and connected.

Installed from the Applications and all settings made in the live session were carried over. Used it for a couple of days. It was slick looking but couldn't see any advantage, for me, over MX Linux so I installed a different version of Linux.

So, how are you liking Alma?

I haven't played around with it much. I don't particularly think it has any advantage over what I usually in the context of a desktop PC. But I still needed to try it and test a few things out to hopefully gain some insights that will eventually trickle its way to my Cloudlinux servers. All new web servers I build will have to use it. Usually I have a checklist which is in fact a script that installs and configures all the little bits, cPanel, email, antispam, DNS cluster, etc... My old script for CentOS needs to be re-adapted to it.

As for XFCE4, well it's the same as always, no matter what underlying OS. I do hope to find some more time to play around with it and see how it really works for daily use.