AlmaLinux Now Supports Raspberry Pi 5

Jun 14, 2024

If you're looking to create with the Raspberry Pi 5 and want to use AlmaLinux as your OS, you're in luck because it's now possible.

The Raspberry Pi 5 was released in October of 2023 and includes some pretty impressive specs for a single-board computer, including a Broadom BCM2717 2.4 GHz quad-core 64-bit ARM Cortext-A76 CPU with 512KB per core, L2 caches, and a 2MB shared L3 cache. The board also includes a VideoCore VII GPU that supports OpenGL ES 3.1 and Vulkan 1.2. So, yeah, it's powerful.

But up until now, the Raspberry Pi 5 lacked the ability to run AlmaLinux. Well, that's now a thing of the past because both AlmaLinux 9.4 and 8.10 can be installed on this device.

According to Koichiro Iwao (Engineer at Cybertrust Japan), "My first step was to learn the Raspberry Pi boot process to build AlmaLinux’s kernel package based on the Raspberry Pi kernel, which is a fork of the Linux kernel." Iwao continues, "Although I had previously contributed to AlmaLinux Raspberry Pi images, I didn’t know much about the boot process. It took considerable time and effort to successfully build a kernel on my ARM environment, overcoming failed builds and boot issues along the way. These attempts allowed me to understand the Raspberry Pi boot process more deeply and identify what was going wrong."

The Raspberry Pi 5 AlmaLinux image includes the Gnome desktop and is based on the Linux 6.6 LTS kernel. You can download the official image from the AlmaLinux download page. Just make sure to visit the ARM tab and then scroll down to the Raspberry Pi section, where you can download images of the 9.4 or the 8.10 releases.
 
 

Want to learn more about AlmaLinux? Check out ADMIN's Focus Guide available for a limited time. Download it free!

 
 
 

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