Several days ago SUSE introduced the SUSE Liberty Linux project, whose objective is to provide a single service to support and manage infrastructure mixed distributions using Red Hat Enterprise Linux and CentOS, in addition to SUSE Linux and openSUSE.
It is worth mentioning that as such the projector is prepared as a new edition of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.5 distribution, built using the Open Build Service platform and suitable for use in place of the classic CentOS 8, which has been discontinued at the end of 2021.
Running a mixed Linux environment is common in today's IT world. That is, competitive enterprises run a wide variety of workloads on a wide variety of Linux distributions, including production workloads running on different enterprise Linux distributions.
The new distribution it's interesting because the content of the user space on SUSE Liberty Linux is formed by rebuilding the original RHEL 8.5 SRPM packages, but the package kernel is replaced with its own version, based on the Linux kernel 5.3 branch and created by rebuilding the kernel package of the SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 SP3 distribution.
Within of the details mentioned The initiative includes the following:
- Provide unified technical support, which allows you not to contact the manufacturer of each used distribution separately, and to solve all problems through a single service.
- Provide a portable toolkit based on SUSE Manager that automates the management of mixed information systems based on solutions from different vendors. That means you can simplify and streamline your disparate Linux environment, from the kernel to the cloud and all the way to the edge.
- Organization of a single process for the delivery of updates with bug fixes and vulnerabilities, covering different distributions.
- Built on the Open Build Service platform and suitable to use instead of the classic CentOS 8, which was discontinued at the end of 2021.
SUSE Liberty Linux is a new technology and support offering that provides customers with a unified support experience to manage their heterogeneous IT environments. With SUSE Liberty Linux, you get trusted support with optional, proven management tools that are optimized for mixed Linux environments, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux, CentOS, and, not surprisingly, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server.
Additionally, using SUSE Manager with SUSE Liberty Linux drives efficiency by taking the routine work out of your IT staff and integrating intelligent automation.
And as a result, you can minimize personnel costs and reduce system implementation and update time, even in complex DevOps scenarios. This frees up your staff to do the innovative work your business requires.
SUSE's CTO, Thomas Di Giacomo said that:
Liberty would include "enterprise-grade support" from the company, including what was described as "optional proven management tools," though only SUSE Manager was mentioned. Manager is an automation tool for creating images, reboots and patches, and configuration changes.
In summary, SUSE Liberty Linux is a new distribution based on a reconstruction of the RHEL packages and the SUSE Linux Enterprise kernel which is supported by SUSE and can be centrally managed using the SUSE Manager platform. Updates for SUSE Liberty Linux will be released after the RHEL updates.
It is worth mentioning that the distribution image is made for x86-64 architecture only and that ready builds are not yet available for testing with SUSE Liberty Linux. CentOS 8 and RHEL 8 users are expected to be able to migrate their systems to the SUSE Liberty Linux distribution, which provides full binary compatibility with RHEL and packages from the EPEL repository.
Finally if you are interested in knowing more about it, you can check the details in the following link