Seeing how the US National Laboratory, Fermi Lab and CERN have selected Alma Linux as their default platforms. I decided to get some Alma experience. Alma is Latin for the word, “home.”

Alma Linux is a fork of CentOS, which was an opensource compatible implementation of RHEL Linux (minus the trademarked logos). On December 8, 2020, IBM’s Red Hat announced the discontinuation of CentOS. Alma Linux and Rocky Linux were both born at this time.

Installing Alma via Kickstart

Using the automated installer for Red Hat based operating systems, called Kickstart, I wanted to install Alma Linux. The first thing I tried was to take a previously working kickstart file, update the installation mirror version, and should be good to go. I have been using CentOS for a long while and had this line that would install the required base OS packages needed for installation.

# Centos 8
#url --mirrorlist="http://mirrorlist.centos.org/?release=8&arch=x86_64&repo=BaseOS&infra=$infra"

The I took that entire kickstart file and modified the installation URL for use to install Rocky Linux 8.6.

# Rocky Linux 8.6
# https://forums.rockylinux.org/t/installation-source-error/3831/4
url --mirrorlist="https://download.rockylinux.org/pub/rocky/8/BaseOS/x86_64/os/"

I assumed then since Alma Linux was based off the same codebase I could take my Rocky Linux mirror and just change the values… I was wrong. I received and error relating to kickstart software selection, basically the kickstart couldn’t find where any of software needed for install was located.

Solution

Finding the Alma Linux Discourse, I found some help that would show me what I was missing. Adding this code in place of the previous url line in my kickstart that had worked for Rocky Linux and CentOS, now I have 4 lines to do the job. It works for 9.1 as well, just add the .1 after the 9.

# set installation source
url --url="https://repo.almalinux.org/almalinux/9/BaseOS/x86_64/kickstart/"
repo --name="alamalinux9-baseos" --baseurl="https://repo.almalinux.org/almalinux/9/BaseOS/x86_64/os/" --mirrorlist=""
repo --name="alamalinux9-appstream" --baseurl="https://repo.almalinux.org/almalinux/9/AppStream/x86_64/os/" --mirrorlist=""
repo --name="epel9-everything" --baseurl="" --mirrorlist="https://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/mirrorlist?repo=epel-9&arch=x86_64"

I would like to say thanks to this user who provided the post: mikew. There is nothing stating this online and very little clear documentation about using kickstart for Alma Linux.