Hi there! Welcome to this month’s AlmaLinux newsletter, where we share the latest AlmaLinux happenings, upcoming events, and more. Quick notes: - We now have a dedicated channel in http://chat.almalinux.org/ chat.almalinux.org for our Spanish-speaking community! - We’ve got major updates for Azure users, and are now listed as an Endorsed Distribution on Azure. - We added another entry in the seres introducing our board to the community. - Tuxcare and CloudLinux renewed their sponsor membership and there was an update to the FIPs process Looking for ways to help? Here are a couple of good ones!The swag shop needs a new tender! Are you someone with organizational chops, and an eye for detail? The Marketing SIG is looking for someone to help audit what’s there and the costs for each item, update what we’re offering, and help us come up with some new designs for our Shop https://shop.almalinux.org/! Email benny at almalinux.org, if you’d like to help out.Help on the forums! [image: 2024-10-30_08-32-18.png] The traffic to the AlmaLinux forums has been steadily increasing over the last year, and that means having answers to the questions there is more important than ever! If you have a few minutes, use the link lnx.rocks/forumhelp to help your fellow sysadmins, developers, and DevOps engineers with opinions, answers, and feedback. Latest from the AlmaLinux BlogAlmaLinux Named an Endorsed Distro in Microsoft Azure Earlier today we announced that AlmaLinux has been selected to join the Endorsed Distributions list on Microsoft Azure https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machines/linux/endorsed-dist..., a unique distinction with only 6 other distributions. We are so grateful to the incredible Azure team for this, and are so excited to see our community supported in this way. Visit the Microsoft Linux and Open Source Blog - Announcing availability of AlmaLinux as an endorsed Linux distribution in Azure https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/linux-and-open-source-blog/announcing... - to see their announcement as well. You can also read more in our blog post here https://almalinux.org/blog/2024-10-30-almalinux-endorsed-distro/. Nov 12th - ALESCo meetup! Since the inception of ALESCo just a few months ago, there has been a lot of exciting news and work coming from ALESCo. Whether you’ve been following along via the minutes https://wiki.almalinux.org/alesco.html, or attending the meetings yourself, or engaging in the chat, we are so humbled by the excitement around what we’re doing. Next month, we’re hosting a meetup so that you can join our ALESCo team and ask all of your burning questions! We hope to see you there https://almalinux.org/blog/2024-10-23-join-the-alesco-meetup/! Introducing AlmaLinux OS Kitten Since we started building AlmaLinux directly from the sources that Red Hat uses for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), we have been able to deliver bug fixes and security patches faster than ever before for our community. We still keep our promise of compatibility with RHEL, and every deviation from RHEL is recorded in our release notes, but our build and infrastructure teams have been embracing that freedom even more. CentOS Stream 10, which will eventually be the source for RHEL10, has already started being built and is available for use today. Because we anticipated many changes in 10, we wanted to get a head start on building AlmaLinux OS 10. Earlier this year we started setting up infrastructure and the build pipeline for AlmaLinux OS 10, and started testing using CentOS Stream 10’s code. Based on this preparation work, we are excited to share that we have successfully built a preview of AlmaLinux OS 10 that we are calling AlmaLinux OS Kitten 10. Read more about AlmaLinux OS Kitten in this blog post https://almalinux.org/blog/2024-10-22-introducing-almalinux-os-kitten/! Welcoming CloudLinux and Tuxcare - Platinum Sponsor Members CloudLinux https://cloudlinux.com/ and its sister company TuxCare https://tuxcare.com/ have renewed their platinum-level sponsorship of the AlmaLinux OS Foundation, and we’re so grateful! They are continuing the commitment they made in 2021 of providing $1 million in annual support for AlmaLinux. You can read more about this in our recent blog post https://almalinux.org/blog/2024-10-16-cloudlinux-renews-sponsorship/. Announcing AlmaLinux 9.5 Beta! AlmaLinux 9.5 Beta “Teal Serval” is now available for all supported architectures: - Intel/AMD (x86_64) - ARM64 (aarch64) - IBM PowerPC (ppc64le) - IBM Z (s390x) Beta ISOs are available at repo.almalinux.org. A usual reminder: this is a beta release. It should not be used for production installations. The provided upgrade instructions should not be used on production machines unless you don’t mind if something breaks. If you are looking to see how things are going to work in stable, you are on the right track. Get more details about this release on our blog here https://almalinux.org/blog/2024-10-15-announcing-95-beta/! Azure Marketplace Updates This month, we shared some updates with our AlmaLinux Azure users. If you’ve been using the original AlmaLinux Azure image for x86_64 architecture (VM Image URN: almalinux:almalinux:*), you should have received an email notifying you that that image is being deprecated and removed from the Azure Marketplace on 30 Dec 2024. Read this blog post https://almalinux.org/blog/2024-10-09-azure-marketplace-updates/ to learn how this does or doesn't impact you! Meet the board - Alex Iribarren For our latest board member Q&A, we interviewed Alex Iribarren https://www.linkedin.com/in/iribarren/. Alex opted for a text-based interview, rather than a video, so you can find the full content in this blog post https://almalinux.org/blog/2024-10-08-meet-the-board-alex/! You'll also find a link to the playlist at the end of this post. AlmaLinux 9.2 FIPS Validation Update After a long wait (view the previous blog post https://almalinux.org/blog/2023-09-19-fips-validation-for-almalinux/), the AlmaLinux 9.2 kernel received FIPS validation making it the first software implementation to receive a FIPS 140-3 ESV certificate using SHA3-256 as a conditioner. It’s also the first EL9 distribution to get a FIPS 140-3 certificate for the kernel. View the certificate here https://csrc.nist.gov/projects/cryptographic-module-validation-program/certi... or read more about this update in our recent blog post https://almalinux.org/blog/2024-10-07-fips-validation-for-almalinux-update/ . Upcoming Events This month, we had one event: All Things Open, and what a blast it was! Keep an eye out to read our recap of ATO and NERDEARLA on our blog. We’re also looking forward to quite a few events before we wrap up the year. Come find us at: - openSUSE.asia http://opensuse.asia/, November 2-3 in Tokyo, Japan - SFSCon https://www.sfscon.it/, November 7-8 in Bolzano, Italy - Seagl https://seagl.org/, November 8-9 in Seattle, Washington, US - Ohio Linux Fest (OLF) https://olfconference.org/, November 15-16 in Columbus, Ohio, US - SC (formerly Supercompute) http://supercomputing.org/, November 17-22 in Atlanta, Georgia, US If you see an event missing that you think we should attend, or if you know of any amazing open source events in Asia, South America, or Africa, let us know! Our community is growing quickly in those areas, and we’d love a chance to connect with them! We’re also looking for volunteers from the AlmaLinux community to help staff our booths. If you like chatting with folks about Linux and open source and are local to any of these events (or any others that you think we should be at) fill out this Google form https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1cQ0YQiAcRZXPnDqiHak-AXmsjEBz-IQE8s8jbPLykds...! We’ll cover your travel and hotel. Thanks for being part of this amazing community. benny Vasquez Chair, Board of Directors @AlmaLinux OS Foundation *I am sending this message now because it suits me, but I don’t expect that you will read, respond to, or act on it outside of comfortable hours for your time zone.*