Ebook: AlmaLinux 9 Essentials: Learn to Install, Administer, and Deploy Rocky Linux 9 Systems

AlmaLinux 9 Essentials is intended to provide detailed information on the installation, use, and administration of the AlmaLinux 9 distribution. For beginners, the book covers topics such as operating system installation, the basics of the GNOME desktop environment, configuring email and web servers, and installing packages and system updates. Additional installation topics, such as dual booting with Microsoft Windows, are also covered, together with all important security topics, such as configuring a firewall and user and group administration.

For the experienced user, topics such as remote desktop access, the Cockpit web interface, logical volume management (LVM), disk partitioning, swap management, KVM virtualization, Secure Shell (SSH), Linux Containers, and file sharing using both Samba and NFS are covered in detail to provide a thorough overview of this enterprise class operating system.

AlmaLinux 9 is one of several variants (also referred to as distributions) of the Linux operating system. It is based on the source code of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux distribution (RHEL), developed by a U.S. company named Red Hat, Inc. Based in Raleigh, North Carolina, the company was founded in the mid-1990s through the merger of two companies owned at the time by Marc Ewing and Bob Young. The origins of Linux, however, go back even further.

AlmaLinux was created in 2021 by the AlmaLinux OS Foundation to provide a stable Linux distribution that is 100% compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux. This originally involved building from the RHEL source code. Now that the RHEL source code is no longer publicly available, the goal is changing to 100% binary compatibility. Binary compatibility means that while AlmaLinux may not be identical to RHEL, it can run the same software and applications that run on RHEL.