How do I install Rocky Linux?

Why?

Rocky Linux is a community version of Enterprise Linux that tracks slightly ahead of the stable release. It’s enterprise-ready and supported by a large community. Rocky Linux is an excellent choice.

How?

Download the ISO image, burn it to a CD, or copy it to a USB device. I burned the minimal ISO image to a CD and ran through the installation instructions.

Installation is straightforward, but make sure you handle these tasks.

  1. Enable an ethernet device.
  2. Add a user account.
  3. Configure your disk.

I chose defaults, and here’s my partition table.

[jeff@localhost ~]$ df -h
Filesystem           Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
devtmpfs             7.8G     0  7.8G   0% /dev
tmpfs                7.8G     0  7.8G   0% /dev/shm
tmpfs                7.8G  8.9M  7.8G   1% /run
tmpfs                7.8G     0  7.8G   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
/dev/mapper/rl-root   70G  3.1G   67G   5% /
/dev/md126p1        1014M  236M  779M  24% /boot
/dev/mapper/rl-home  1.8T   13G  1.8T   1% /home
tmpfs                1.6G     0  1.6G   0% /run/user/1000

Install Ansible

Ansible saves you a lot of administrative pain; thank me later.

sudo dnf update -y # Reboot if required
sudo dnf install -y epel-release
sudo dnf install ansible -y

# All good?
ansible --version

Set Your Hostname

vi /etc/hosts
# Change the line with 127.0.0.1:
# 127.0.0.1   myhostname.domain.com
systemctl restart systemd-hostnamed
sudo reboot

Common Utilities

As a programmer, I need a few utilities.

sudo dnf install git
sudo dnf install nodejs # Lots of fancy utilities
sudo dnf install nvm
curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/creationix/nvm/master/install.sh | bash`

Conclusion

I hope you enjoy working with a rock-solid and free operating system!

Rocky Linux 8 vs CentOS Stream 8 vs RHEL 8 vs Oracle Linux 8 vs AlmaLinux 8