The latest and greatest version of Rocky Linux has been released, battle tested, and is ready-to-go.
The Rocky Linux team yesterday announced the release of Rocky Linux 9.5 as a drop-in replacement for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.5, which was released one week ago, on October 13.
For the uninitiated, Rocky Linux is one of the two most used independently developed clones of RHEL, the other being AlmaLinux. Although the two distributions both purport to be RHEL “clones”, they get there by two different routes, with AlmaLinux not being so much a clone of RHEL as a feature-by-feature copy.
Rocky Linux strives to be more of a true clone — that is, a line by line copy of RHEL’s code, making it more like CentOS was until Red Hat moved it upstream and changed its name to CentOS Stream. That shouldn’t be surprising, since Rocky Linux’s founder, Gregory Kurtzer, was one of the founders of CentOS back around the turn of the century when CentOS first got going.
Given that Rocky Linux is basically a copy and paste of Red Hat’s code, some might wonder why it took six days to get this release out-the-door after the release of RHEL 9.5. That’s because even if a distro is supposed to be a bug-by-bug clone, the final product still needs to be tested to make sure that our old friend “human error” didn’t somehow throw a monkey wrench into the machinery.
“Every Rocky Linux release undergoes thorough testing for accuracy and stability, and Rocky Linux 9.5 is no exception,” the Rocky team explains in the new version’s release announcement. “The Rocky Linux testing process incorporates manual and automated checks across a wide variety of environments and setups. We have validated this release for a week before approving it for availability.”
Notable New Features
Although by definition Rocky Linux doesn’t contain anything that’s not already in RHEL 9.5, a few new features are notable because they might be of interest for those who aren’t necessarily looking at Rocky because it’s a drop-in for RHEL.
For instance, it ships with Podman’s latest and greatest version 5.0, which in addition to quicker Podman machine boot times, features Podman Farm for multi-platform image building, greater compatibility for volumes in podman kube play, Quadlet enhancements, and with better performance from its default networking stack.
In addition, the latest Cockpit web console now has improved file management capabilities through the Cockpit Files plugin, which requires installing the cockpit-files package.
Upgrades and Installation
To upgrade to Rocky Linux 9.5 from any Rocky Linux 9 version run sudo dnf -y upgrade from a command line, or use a desktop tool such as GNOME Software or KDE Discover. Users from other Enterprise Linux 9 based distributions may convert their installations to Rocky Linux 9.5 using the distro’s migrate2rocky utilities. Otherwise, updated installation media, container, cloud, and live images are available from the Rocky Linux Downloads webpage.
Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux
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