The first pre-release of Rocky Linux is here. It is immediately available for download and for you to test.
Rocky Linux is a new Linux distribution which is announced as a new project after Red Hat prematurely pulls the plug on CentOS Linux last year. It is an initiative from the creator of CentOS and thousands across the world to bring a truly free and open-source CentOS replacement that will be 1-to-1 binary compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
Within months, the team really pulled off a massive work of ideating a brand new Linux distribution, forming team, beanding, marketing, infratsructure and many other aspects. That too within couple of months since the announcement.
And today, the first release candidate RockyLinux RC1 is here for you to download for your desktops, servers.
The Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation (RESF) is pleased to announce the general availability of the Rocky Linux 8.3 release candidate 1 for x86_64 and AArch64 architectures. This release is the culmination of months of hard work from every corner of the community. What started in a comment thread on a Red Hat blog in December of 2020 grew to a community over ten thousand strong in a Slack channel in a matter of days. From there you pulled together to build teams around infrastructure, branding, website, development, special interest groups and more.
Rocky Linux Team
That said, I could not find any change log of the release candidate. However, here’s a quick summary of Rocky Linxu 8.3 RC1.
Rocky Linux 8.3 RC1
Here’s a quick list of important packages in Rocky Linux 8.3 server.
- Linux Kernel 4.18: It features Linux Kernel 4.18 stable. Although this Kernel is EOL as per the mainline, it is being supported by the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)
- Based on the current stable RHEL 8.3
- Desktop Environment – GNOME 3.32
- sqlite 3.26
- virt-what 1.18
- samba 4.12.3
- dnf 4.2
- rpm 4.14
- glibc 2.28
- libgcc 8.3
Download
You can download this release candidate using the following links. There is a full download, minimal and net install images available.
The team says that many new upcoming features are planned along with more architecture availability options. Being a server distribution, Rocky Linux will also be available with many popular clouds provides for your deployment needs. The team is working hard to get you an enterprise-grade free server operating system. Many small businesses, engineers will be forever grateful to the Rocky Linux team in the coming days.
That said, make sure to download the release candidate from the above link and test. And report bugs.
If you need help, you can reach out to the official Rocky Linux forum here.
