AlmaLinux OS Now Officially Supports the Raspberry Pi 5 Computer

posted by Marius Nestor on Jun 11, 2024,
updated Jun 14, 2024

It’s been a long time coming and it’s also been challenging for the devs, but Raspberry Pi 5 support is finally here for both AlmaLinux OS 9.4 and AlmaLinux OS 8.10 releases, featuring the GNOME desktop environment as the default graphical interface.

Koichiro Iwao explains the challenges he had to face when updating the Raspberry Pi images of AlmaLinux OS to support the latest Raspberry Pi 5 board, saying that he had to learn the Raspberry Pi boot process to build a kernel for AlmaLinux OS based on the official Linux 6.6 LTS kernel used in Raspberry Pi OS.

Read on

Linuxiac:

• AlmaLinux Launches Raspberry Pi 5 Support

  The integration began when Koichiro Iwao, an engineer at Cybertrust Japan with a passion for Raspberry Pi, joined the AlmaLinux community. With a background deeply rooted in Japan’s vibrant Raspberry Pi scene, he was inspired to enhance AlmaLinux’s utility for these popular microcomputers.

  AlmaLinux already offered Raspberry Pi images, but the launch of Raspberry Pi 5 in October 2023, noted for its substantial hardware upgrades, sparked increased demand for compatible AlmaLinux versions.

  Adapting AlmaLinux for Raspberry Pi 5 was no small feat. Initially, the project involved understanding the distinct boot process of Raspberry Pi, which is based on a specialized fork of the Linux kernel.

Also here:

• AlmaLinux OS - Forever-Free Enterprise-Grade Operating System

  An Open Source, community owned and governed, forever-free enterprise Linux distribution.

BetaNews:

• AlmaLinux finally gains support for Raspberry Pi 5 -- download it now

  The AlmaLinux OS Foundation, a nonprofit managing the community-owned open-source CentOS alternative AlmaLinux OS, has announced support for the Raspberry Pi 5. This has been a while coming as the latest version of the Pi, released in October 2023, has been growing in popularity within the AlmaLinux community. Koichiro Iwao, an engineer at Cybertrust Japan, played a major role in bringing AlmaLinux Raspberry Pi 5 support to fruition. "In Japan, the Raspberry Pi community is vibrant," he said.

iTWire:

• iTWire - AlmaLinux offers installation images for Raspberry Pi

  In a statement, the Foundation said the most recent Raspberry Pi had a sizeable presence in the education sector for teaching programming and computing.

  Support for AlmaLinux Raspberry Pi 5 has been contributed by Koichiro Iwao, an engineer who works at Cybertrust Japan.

  “Here in Japan, the Raspberry Pi community is vibrant,” said Iwao aka @metalefty on GitHub. “The incredible hardware improvements that the Raspberry Pi 5 brings over the Raspberry Pi 4, along with the increasing urgency with which the community was requesting this support, galvanised my commitment to building Raspberry Pi 5 support for AlmaLinux OS.”

Hackster.io:

• AlmaLinux 9.4, 8.10 Gain Support for the Raspberry Pi 5 Single-Board Computer - Hackster.io

  AlmaLinux, the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)-compatible Linux distribution, has announced a milestone release — bringing with it official support, for the first time, for the Raspberry Pi 5 single-board computer.

  "When I joined the AlmaLinux Community, I had a keen interest in Raspberry Pi images," writes AlmaLinux contributor Koichiro Iwao. "There were already existing Raspberry Pi images, so I began contributing by updating them. The release of Raspberry Pi 5 in October 2023, with its significant upgrades and improvements, brought even more interest in AlmaLinux for Raspberry Pi.

Linux Magazine:

• AlmaLinux Now Supports Raspberry Pi 5 » Linux Magazine

  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.