Rocky Linux, a powerful enterprise-grade Linux distribution based on the RHEL, has gained widespread popularity among developers, sysadmins, and organizations seeking a stable and secure platform.
Less than a week after the RHEL 9.2 release, Rocky Linux 9.2 followed suit, offering expanded capabilities, security updates, and other fixes.
So, the new stable Rocky Linux 9.2 release for x86_64, aarch64, and s390x architectures, powered by Linux kernel 5.14, is ready for production and to power up your computing needs and workloads. So let’s see what’s new.
Rocky Linux 9.2 Highlights
To begin with, you may have noticed that PowerPC (ppc64le) is not among the architectures for which the new release is available. This is due to the developers identifying an architecture-specific issue with Python 3.9 on ppc64le systems, which may break existing installs.
Because of this, the release of Rocky Linux 9.2 for ppc64le has been postponed until this issue is resolved.
On the security side, many SELinux user-space packages, which include the sepolicy utility, have also been bumped to version 3.5. On top of that, Keylime, a highly scalable remote boot attestation, and runtime integrity measurement solution, received an update to 6.5.2, containing various enhancements and bug fixes.
And speaking of SELinux, we should highlight that the widespread VPN implementation WireGuard is now working with SELinux enabled again after experiencing some issues in the past.
Moreover, many system and development tools have also received updates in the Rocky Linux 9.2 release, with the more important ones being Python 3.11, GCC Toolset 12, Rust 1.66, Go 1.19.6, Nginx 1.22, Git 2.39.1, Git LFS 3.2.0, PostgreSQL 15, Tomcat 9, and Grafana 9.0.9.
If you bet on Rocky as a desktop system, the distro ships with GNOME 40.4, which runs on Wayland by default, and the availability of the Pipewire audio server.
Finally, the distribution provides a variety of alternative ISO images with different desktop environments to choose from, including GNOME, KDE, Xfce, and MATE. In addition, now Rocky 9.2 adds a new one, with the Cinnamon desktop environment.
With a focus on cloud providers, images with the latest distro version are also available for Oracle Cloud Platform, GenericCloud, Amazon AWS, Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure, and others.
For more information about all changes in Rocky Linux 9.2, you can refer to the official announcement or visit the release notes.
If you are currently running Rocky Linux 9, to upgrade to the latest 9.2 release, run the following DNF command in the terminal:
sudo dnf upgrade -yLast but not least, remember that Rocky Linux does not offer an official upgrade path from any version of Rocky Linux 8, and the devs’ recommendations are to do a fresh OS install to move to Rocky Linux 9.2.
However, testing in our lab has shown that upgrading from Rocky 8 to 9 is possible. So if you’re interested in how to do it, the guide is here, with the caveat that you must take the risks of any complications arising.
