Rocky Linux 8.4 is designed as a drop-in CentsOS replacement. It was created by the same person who birthed CentOS into being, Gregory Kurtzer, and Rocky follows the same mission of offering an enterprise-ready version of Linux. The name was chosen as a tribute to early CentOS co-founder Rocky McGaugh.
Rocky Linux 8.4 is a complete binary-compatible release using the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.4 operating system source code. The release is launching more than a half year after Red Hat deprecated its support for the widely popular CentOS server operating system.
Rocky Linux and competitor AlmaLinux, which released its own binary compliant RHEL clone in March, are built from the same source code as RHEL. This ensuring that a wide range of proprietary software designed with only RHEL in mind will “just work”.
Users of other RHEL 8.4 binary-compatible distributions can use the free migrate2rocky tool for convenient, in-place migration to Rocky Linux 8.4. It has been tested to be useful for migrating from Alma Linux 8.4, CentOS Linux 8.4, RHEL 8.4, and Oracle Linux 8.4 but to be used at your own risk.
The harder problem to solve here was not building the operating system, it was building the infrastructure to build the operating system. We’re feeling extremely confident that we have a very stable, very rock solid operating system.
Gregory M. Kurtzer, Founder of Rocky Linux
In addition to, he revealed it took four months to get the infrastructure and organization ground out and about two months to build the operating system.
Rocky Linux 8.4 comes with:
- Kernel 4.18.0-305
- GCC Toolset 10
- Python 3.9
- SWIG 4.0
- Subversion 1.14
- Redis 6
- PostgreSQL 13
- MariaDB 10.5
You can download the ISO from the official website. It is is available for x86_64 and AArch64 with multiple ISO varieties. The official announcement is here.
