Fedora 36, RHEL 9, and Alma Linux 9 all now GA!

In Linux news this month, it’s been release after release! Not only did we see the general availability of Fedora 36, but also RHEL 9 and Alma Linux 9. I’m going to dive into the highlights for each below, as well as take a look at Red Hat Summit on Demand. So let's jump right in! 

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Fedora 36 has been released, and per their website, it is “by the community, for the community”. The announcement highlights the special type of team that makes this release possible — an inclusive and welcoming community — and emphasizes the importance of experts and newbies working together. 

This release includes some very important updates, including bug fixes in F34/F35 updates. This means that your system should be fully up to date before performing the upgrade, or it may fail if those dependencies aren't already satisfied. 

Workstation improvements include GNOME 42 desktop environment with a text editor and console, and a transition from NVIDIA to Wayland graphics drivers. Server improvements include the latest release of Ansible Podman 4.0 with backward-compatible API changes, and updated programming language and system libraries, such as Ruby 3.1, Golang 1.18, and PHP 8.1. 

The update that I'm most impressed by is the addition of Cockpit, which is a tool to admin NFS and Samba shares. This makes working with file shares across the network easier than ever and proves that Fedora, in fact, does have the latest the open-source world has to offer.

Red Hat held their yearly summit virtually in May. This year, they hosted an interactive virtual experience online, which was full of keynotes, guest speakers, and ask-the-expert panels. The virtual summit is available online for a full year, and it's free! This year's focus was "exploring what we can do when we share perspectives and work together." 

On-demand sessions include everything from big data, DevOps, high availability, Internet of Things, hybrid cloud and multi-cloud, virtualization, and security. 

In addition to keynotes and amazing technical content in on-demand sessions, it also includes open-source stories, the Red Hat Innovation Awards, and the Red Hat Certified Professional of the Year. 

They've even included a couple of challenging activities just for fun in the open-source arcade. My favorites are:

• Command Line Heroes, where you see how many bash commands you can type in 60 seconds and;
• Pod Escape, where your project is being deleted, and you have to help a pod from disappearing from the digital landscape. 

Also included is Compiler, which is a show that bridges the gap between tech newbies and those behind the code. You can take a fun "this or that" quiz to get custom show content you may be interested in. It's tailored to your preference from answering questions such as "do you like burgers or pizza?" 

The on demand offering is quite amazing, but Red Hat doesn't stop there. They will also be hosting a series of in-person "Connect" events: 

• New York, NY September 15, 2022
• Dallas, TX September 28, 2022
• San Francisco, CA September 29, 2022 

You can find more information on these sessions and to access the virtual content online. 

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So if you haven't heard of the Open Source Security Foundation by now, don't worry because I'm here to tell you all about it. As per their website, the OSFF is “an organization that provides tools, services, training, infrastructure, and resources to achieve a future where participants use and share high-quality software by verifying the quality of the software supply chain and where the code comes from”. 

Many companies are now getting involved, contributing, and having their voice heard by collaborating on the future of open-source software. After recently adding 15 new members, OpenSSF now has a total of 25 premiere members, including companies such as AWS, Cisco, DELL, GitHub, IBM, Intel, Oracle, Microsoft, Meta, Red Hat, and VMWare. 

If you would like to find out more about the future of open-source software and maybe get involved yourself, you can find more information at openssf.org. 

RHEL 9 Stable was released as generally available to the public on May 17! While being aimed at meeting the needs of the hybrid cloud environment, this release is also tailored to support workloads on physical hardware, virtual machines, and containers, making it the perfect release to support deployments from the edge to the cloud! 

Fedora 36 fixes production stability and development agility issues, but my favorite feature is the new Linux 9 web console, Cockpit. It supports live patching and contains performance metrics to identify system issues by reporting on high CPU, memory, disk, and network resource usage spikes. 

This makes managing your server much more efficient by having all of those tools in one place without having to run all of those separate commands and also reduces downtime. 

If you prefer the benefits of Alma Linux, version 9 has been released, and it's free! It's also actually based on RHEL 9. It ships with kernel 5.14 LTS, and it's the first version produced from RHELs source code through the CentOS stream. 

It includes all of the updates from RHEL 9, including performance metrics in the web console, building images from a single build node, and better security and encryption with OpenSSL4. 

That's it for Linux news this month. Join the conversation on Discord, Twitter and Facebook, and subscribe to A Cloud Guru on YouTube for fresh Linux and cloud content that helps you keep up to date on all things tech.