I’m new on Rocky and i have never used a Rhel based distro… I have used Debian based for several years, so I’m not a total noob LOL
Last night i installed Rocky on a VM to see what it is…
Today i installed it on a old laptop… an OLD laptop LOL HP Pavilion DV6 i5 second gen 8GB ram
I have no use of that one, so its a perfect " I’m gonna screw up my install by learning" machine
I have installed the latest Xfce ISO as i like that simple desktop environment… i use that on Debian too.
My first question to you guys is…
As I’m planing on using Rocky both on sever in the future… But now as Workstation/office usage.
Any good tips and tricks for configure Rocky to become perfect?
I have a feeling i need to hunt down some Radeon drivers for this laptop… i remember i had a nightmare on Debian.
Edit 1.
The laptop wont even boot after install… first adventure begins. lol
Edit 1:2 / * Fixed now it works… first lesion… update-grub do not exist in Rocky
it will also install flatpaks as well as being able to be used for installing normal packages available through dnf. Then just search in your app list for “Software” to browse packages/apps to install.
I have added that one.
But that one dont list all install packages as Synaptic package manager does.
I kind of got the habit of cleaning house on debian by uninstall packages i dont use/have use for.
as SSH is just an attack surface if you dont have use for it so to speak… as one example of many.
I have a lot new to learn as so many things are different on Rhel based systems
I have already mistyped apt instead of dnf hundred times LOL
I have to give up for today… as I have no more free time on my hands
I missing touchpad driver as i cant disable side to side scrolling in mouse settings, so I’m guessing it has loaded wrong driver
I had that problem on Debian and installed xserver-xorg-input-synaptics
But that one do not exist In rocky…
So i have to look in on it another day when i have a bit more time.
I did get Rocky going on the laptop at least
One step closer to a workstation work OS
Take care folks and see you next time i dive in to Rocky Linux
A little continuation question of my first question
You guys that have used Rocky Linux for a while… and maybe in CentOS before Rocky was born.
What is the Ten best Rocky/Rhel based commands to remember?
that is RockyLinux specific so to speak.
(even if i do have a few years in debian based, i have notice some things just dont seem to work quite the same all the time)
I won’t say “commands”, but in my opinion the main areas that RedHat and Debian differ are:
Package management (rpm vs dpkg; yum/dnf vs apt/apt-get). Understanding this ecosystem (adding repos, signing keys, dependency management etc) is big
init system; while both are now systemd based, Debian appears to have a lot of backwards compatibility scripts (eg update-rc.d) to make migrations from older versions easier. RedHat doesn’t.
Networking. Debian appears to have 101 different ways to configure networking (and they sometimes fight each other). RedHat really wants you to use network manager. Similarly RedHat pushes firewalld/nft; Debian still has iptable wrappers out of the box (it’s optional on RedHat).
AppArmor vs SELinux. If you stray off the “approved path” then they’ll bite you and they’re different. I still don’t know why Debian complains about “apt install $HOME/Downloads/package.deb” with an AppArmor violation, but it happily allows a “dpkg -i …” of the same file.
Then some packages work differently; eg both have apache, but they’re organised differently and have different management methods. We go spend a lot of time in individual package differences!
I have notice one big difference between Debain based and Rhel based.
apt update ony update the package list from the repo… and then you run apt upgrade to actually update. While in Rocky dnf update is the same as apt upgrade. So that is a new muscle memory to un-learn
ansible-playbook is something i have had plans on learning for a couple of years now… i got that tip from another Linux user when i looked for the laziest way to install a fresh system.
Thanks, i will look in to Red Hat documentation of System Roles.
Commands might been a bit specific of me as i also meant other core differences.
Fastest way to learn is to learn what the differences are, as Linux is more or less just Linux… and then the differences comes in
Okay… thats interesting if networking is a bit different as i have been swearing on and off for the last 5years on Windows ↔ Linux networking
Its easy to get windows clients to connect to Linux shares… but getting Linux clients to connect to windows shares with using network discovery and browse the network… that is like walking in a minefield… working… working… kaboom, not working…
so when you say “(and they sometimes fight each other)” that actually make sense to me.
firewalld/nft you say… i have to look in to that one… I have been using iptables and then nftables and i found a really nice GUI for that one… Opensnitch … really nice to have on the client side as you often install new software or just temporary want to block a program for testing etc.
I’m one of “those” … that love the GUI world. LOL
So when i can find GUI’s that can do what i want, then i go for the GUI before the Terminal… But I’m not afraid of the Terminal, so i do use it when i have to.
I have never tried that one… I use “apt install ~/Downloads/package.deb" on Debian.
AppArmor vs SELinux… okay… one more thing i will look in to Thanks
smiling Yeah i do notice some packages works different, and i walked in to this knowing it would not become a walk in the park… So thats why i installed it on a old crappy laptop, so i can take 5minutes here and there to learn Rocky… as i have really low on time i can spend at the computer learning/testing… 95% of my computer time is work… 3% social like this… 2% maintaining my systems and learning time.
So my strategy is Rocky on the laptop to use 5minutes here and there to learn as i have no room for downtime or hiccups.
But 5minutes here and there becomes hundreds of hours over time so i wont give up switshing systems.
By networking I was talking of the lower level plumbing; getting an IP address, creating bridges, etc.
For example, on a newly installed Debian 12 machine I set up a bridge in /etc/network/interfaces
auto lo
iface lo inet loopback
iface enp1s0 inet manual
auto br0
iface br0 inet dhcp
bridge_ports enp1s0
bridge_hw enp1s0
This worked fine; I rebooted, the machine had connectivity. But after a few minutes it broke! enp1s0 got a link local 169.254 address even though it was set to “manual”. And that’s because conman was also running and it decided to set an address. The solution was to disable conman.
So out of the box, Debian allows for (at least) two different ways of configuring the network and they can fight each other.
Talking to remote SMB servers is a different thing. It can be hard because Microsoft only supports windows clients. That we can get Linux to talk to MS at all should be considered a miracle
Earlier versions (of RHEL) did have both initscripts-based network configuration and NetworkManager, even enabled. If you did not notice that, then you did got a fight there too.
Likewise, for some time it was possible to install and enable firewalld.service, iptables.service, and nftables.service, even though there can be only one service that manages firewall rules.
Yeah, but I’m talking about the latest and greatest versions now; what you get out-of-box with Rocky9 or Debian12 and highlighting it as one of the differences; RedHat really want you to use NetworkMangler now, but Debian out-of-box provides foot shooting opportunities
…
Error occurred:
g-io-error-quark: GDBus.Error:org.freedesktop.DBus.Python.dnf.exceptions.RepoError: Traceback (most recent call last):
File “/usr/lib/python3.9/site-packages/dnf/repo.py”, line 574, in load
ret = self._repo.load()
File “/usr/lib64/python3.9/site-packages/libdnf/repo.py”, line 331, in load
return _repo.Repo_load(self)
libdnf._error.Error: Failed to download metadata for repo ‘baseos’: Cannot prepare internal mirrorlist: Status code: 404 for https://mirrors.rockylinux.org/mirrorlist?arch=x86_64&repo=BaseOS-9$rltype (IP: ********)
During handling of the above exception, another exception occurred:
Traceback (most recent call last):
File “/usr/lib64/python3.9/site-packages/dbus/service.py”, line 715, in _message_cb
retval = candidate_method(self, *args, **keywords)
File “/usr/lib/python3.9/site-packages/dnfdaemon/server/init.py”, line 68, in newFunc
rc = func(*args, **kwargs)
File “/usr/share/dnfdaemon/dnfdaemon-system”, line 238, in GetPackages
value = self.get_packages(pkg_filter, fields)
File “/usr/lib/python3.9/site-packages/dnfdaemon/server/init.py”, line 386, in get_packages
pkgs = getattr(self.base.packages, pkg_filter)
File “/usr/lib/python3.9/site-packages/dnfdaemon/server/init.py”, line 205, in base
self._get_base()
File “/usr/lib/python3.9/site-packages/dnfdaemon/server/init.py”, line 1123, in _get_base
self._base.setup_base()
File “/usr/lib/python3.9/site-packages/dnfdaemon/server/backend.py”, line 113, in setup_base
self.fill_sack()
File “/usr/lib/python3.9/site-packages/dnf/base.py”, line 406, in fill_sack
self._add_repo_to_sack(r)
File “/usr/lib/python3.9/site-packages/dnf/base.py”, line 141, in _add_repo_to_sack
repo.load()
File “/usr/lib/python3.9/site-packages/dnf/repo.py”, line 581, in load
raise dnf.exceptions.RepoError(str(e))
dnf.exceptions.RepoError: Failed to download metadata for repo ‘baseos’: Cannot prepare internal mirrorlist: Status code: 404 for https://mirrors.rockylinux.org/mirrorlist?arch=x86_64&repo=BaseOS-9$rltype (IP: ************)
(36)
…
… that love the GUI world. LOL 
