The developers of the AlmaLinux distribution, founded by CloudLinux in response to the premature end of support for CentOS 8, introduced the ELevate toolkit, which makes it easy to migrate working installations of CentOS 7.x to distributions built on the RHEL 8 package base, while preserving applications, data and settings. The project currently supports migration to AlmaLinux, Rocky Linux, CentOS Stream and Oracle Linux.
The migration process is based on the use of the Leapp utility developed by Red Hat, which is supplemented with patches that take into account the specifics of CentOS and third-party distributions built on the RHEL package base. The project also uses an extended set of metadata that describes the steps for translating individual packages from one distribution branch to another.
To migrate, just connect the repository provided by the project, install the package with the migration script on the selected distribution (leapp-data-almalinux, leapp-data-centos, leapp-data-oraclelinux, leapp-data-rocky) and run the leapp utility. For example, to migrate to Rocky Linux, you can run the following commands after updating your system to the latest state: sudo yum install -y http://repo.almalinux.org/elevate/elevate-release-latest-el7.noarch.rpm sudo yum install -y leapp-upgrade leapp-data-rocky sudo leapp preupgrade sudo leapp upgrade
Recall that Red Hat has limited the time to support the classic distribution of CentOS 8 - updates for this branch will be released until December 2021, and not until 2029, as originally planned. CentOS will be replaced by the CentOS Stream build, the key difference of which is that the classic CentOS acted as a βdownstreamβ, i.e. was built from already formed stable releases of RHEL, while CentOS Stream is positioned as "upstream" for RHEL, i.e. it will test packages before being included in RHEL releases (RHEL will be rebuilt based on CentOS Stream).
CentOS Stream will allow earlier access to the features of a future RHEL branch, but includes packages that are not yet fully stabilized. With CentOS Stream, third-party contributors can control the preparation of packages for RHEL, propose changes, and influence decisions. Previously, a snapshot of one of the Fedora releases was used as the basis for a new RHEL branch, which was finalized and stabilized behind closed doors, without the ability to control the development progress and decisions made.
The community has responded to the change by creating several alternatives to the classic CentOS 8, including VzLinux (produced by Virtuozzo), AlmaLinux (developed by CloudLinux, in collaboration with the community), Rocky Linux (developed by the community under the leadership of the founder of CentOS with the support of a specially created company Ctrl IQ) and Oracle linux. In addition, Red Hat has made RHEL available free of charge to open source organizations and individual developer environments of up to 16 virtual or physical systems.
Source: opennet.ru