Initially, Alabaster was only intended to target CentOS 7 and Debian 10, as both of these were the last stable Linux distros to support the Knights Corner Xeon Phi cards, of which I have so many and intend to leverage in building Grovercomp (https://log.grovercomp.ai/).
However, I also do other forms of sysadmin work, and have deployed Rocky Linux and Arch Linux on some new datacenter-leased servers that are in the throes of migration. Awkwardly, introducing Arch Linux breaks the previously clean dichotomy Alabaster had where some distros are non-GUI, while others are GUI-first, since it works just as well for both cases, and anyway, there's nothing wrong with deploying Debian server-side. To solve this, I am implementing two (2) variant scripts of the classic
alabaster.sh one-liner: one CLI-only (headless) distro of Alabaster available at
cli.alabaster.sh, and another GUI-first distro of Alabaster available at
gui.alabaster.sh. As for the bare, unqualified original at
alabaster.sh, it will offer an opportunistic script that will default to either GUI or CLI installation depending on your distro. For distros that can support both, it will ask you to
wget from the new endpoints in order to choose and do nothing.
For now, this is the support matrix:
- Debian GNU/Linux [CLI and GUI]
- Debian 10 (buster)
- Debian 11 (bullseye)
- Debian 12 (bookworm)
- Open RHEL derivatives [CLI only]
- CentOS 7
- Rocky Linux 8
- Rocky Linux 9
- AlmaLinux 8
- AlmaLinux 9
- Arch Linux (rolling) [CLI and GUI]