With the recent GA announcements of RedHat 8.8 as well as its upstream alternatives Rocky Linux 8.8 and AlmaLinux 8.8 one can now finally update Linux offline!

With this enhancement, you can apply offline updates to RHEL by using the new yum offline-upgrade command.

There are times when you have too many services running on the system and many services that need stopping or restarting post the updates do not stop or restart within the timeout defined for the yum upgrade packages, which causes the yum upgrade command to fail.

The one easy solution for this is to reboot into the minimal mode, where only the most necessary services needed for Linux to run, will be running. This solution has been put to practice for the command yum offline-upgrade.

To fix this issue, you can simply run yum offline-upgrade download. On running this, yum will download all the package updates onto the system the usual way. Then you need to run yum offline-upgrade reboot. The system will now reboot into a minimal mode, install the updated packages that were downloaded earlier and then reboot back into the normal mode.

AWS has recently announced the public preview of its next version of Amazon Linux. Amazon linux 3, codenamed AL2022, brings in improvements in design, security, stability and performance over its predecessor Amazon Linux 2.

Starting with AL2022, Amazon will launch a major version of its Amazon Linux every two years and each version will be supported for five years, with quarterly updates via minor releases and use the latest software for their applications. Starting, Amazon Linux 3, they have finally introduced the ability to lock to a specific version of the Amazon Linux package repository giving customers control over how and when they absorb updates.

Amazon Linux is a Linux distribution targetted and optimized for use in the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) environment of Amazon Web Services. It uses the same Yum repository for updates using the RPM files like the Fedora, CentOS and Redhat family of Linux.

While earlier versions of Amazon Linux, 1 and 2 were built upon CentOS, since the movement of CentOS also to the upstream of Redhat development with CentOS Stream, now, both CentOS Stream 9 and Amazon Linux use Fedora Project as their upstream, with CentOS stream also becoming the upstream for the eventual major build of Redhat.

While Amazon Linux 3 is still to offer support for ARM processors, CentOS 9 Stream has support across the processor variates including x86_64, aarch64 and ppc64le.

As a final note, we can just add that both, Amazon Linux 3 as well as CentOS 9 Stream have the stable and well tested Linux Enterprise Kernel, are both free and targetted towards Enterprises and Server side installs. While Amazon Linux 3 is well suited for EC2 instances, similar to CentOS 9 Stream, you can download Amazon Linux 3 on your local machines using VirtualBox or VMWare.

Download Amazon Linux 3 for VMWare

Download Amazon Linux 3 for VirtualBox

Download CentOS 9 Stream for VMWare

Download CentOS 9 Stream for VirtualBox