Recommended Packages for new users

Rocky Linux General
1

Hello everyone

I have just joined the forums.
Ive heard a lot of good things about Rocky Linux ever since the CentOS project changed for downstream to upstream. I’m new to the REL Eco system. I come form the Debian world but want to diversify my knowledge so here I am.

I’m busy setting up rock with cloud-init and was just wondering what packages do community members use that just makes life abit easier and convenient.

Ive already got

  • hotop
  • cifs-utils
  • fail2ban
  • unzip
  • rsyslog
  • cockpit
  • nfs-utils
  • iscsi

any more suggestions would be much appreciated

2

The answer to your question depends on your use case.

Webserver? Mailserver? Desktop? Software development? Accounting? Publishing? Network security? Something else (since this list is far from exhaustive)?

Personally I use Rocky for everything from my personal desktop to creating plates for a printing press but what you want to do will likely be different to what I find useful.

3

Hi,
On our servers as a general practice , we installed the below package after OS installation

yum install epel-release.noarch

yum install screen telnet net-tools lsof vim bind-utils wget curl tcpdump rsync bash-completion dstat sysstat lvm2 mlocate smem make unzip

4

I just want to get a general use case out of it from. containerization with podman. network appliance and cloudstack or openstack hosts for bare metal. but basically anything i find interesting that prefers a RHEL distro maybe even storage targets like ceph or gluster.

With regard to your use case i had o idea it was so versatile but its Linux so it makes sense

All in the cause of learning new skills

5

Thats actually a very useful list i got a few of them when i was still thinking link curl and unzip.

Thanks a lot :slight_smile:

6

Hello @BrodiePetersen! Another good resource for you might be the documentation site: https://docs.rockylinux.org. You can find out what people (at least those that have written documentation) are using Rocky Linux for, and it may tweak an interest for you.

Welcome to Rocky Linux!

7

Thanks for pointing me to the docs and the welcome :slight_smile:

Ive been experimenting with it and am already testing out a couple of hours now and i have a few workloads im testing out on it. i will use it more in my vm stack in combination with my debian systems. and i love the long support cycle for each release

and the welcoming community it the best part :laughing:

1 Like
8

The “yum repositories” do have metadata. Part of that are “groups” and “modules”.
You can see some of the groups with:

dnf group list

There are both “environment” and regular groups. A group is a list of packages.
An environment group is list of groups.
You can see the list of, for example, the “Standard” group with:

dnf group info Standard

… or more verbosely:

dnf group -v info Standard

You can install packages of a group with:

dnf group install Standard

In the installer you did essentially chose an environment group to install.
You can (re)install any and all packages or groups as you see fit.

The “GNOME Workstation”, “Hypervisor”, or “Server with GUI” are thus convenient way to install larger set of packages. Whether you need all is up to you.

9

I prefer to “demand load” packages as I need them. I don’t want my system cluttered with stuff I’ll never use. That invites security holes. With a decent Internet connection, it’s quite fast and simple to use dnf to pull packages as you find you need them.