Rocky Linux 8.6 Available Now

Announcements
1

Hello everyone. I am pleased to announce the general availability of
Rocky Linux 8.6. This release is for the x86_64 and aarch64
architectures and is derived from Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.6.

Please read through the release notes at:
Release 8.6 - Documentation - These notes contain
important information about the release, details about some of the
content inside the release (such as newer modules or updates throughout
the distribution) and highlights.

General Repository Changes

openldap-servers

While it may not be very well known, we were providing the
openldap-servers package as part of our Plus repository alongside
thunderbird and open-vm-tools for aarch64. openldap-servers is now part
of the PowerTools repository. In the event this changes again, we will
of course let you know in our announcements.

multiple bind versions

The standard bind version is the 9.11 series. In 8.6, bind9.16 is now
available as a choice for those who want to use a newer bind series.

perl module streams rebuilt

With the exception of the default base perl module (5.26), all other
perl module streams have been completely rebuilt. Thanks to our testing
team, its members, and others in the community, we were able to identify
and stamp out the problematic behavior that has unfortunately existed in
our previous releases.

Known Issues

dotnet

As reported in our 8.5 release, we had to override the builds for the
dotnet packages to fake “rhel” as the RID. This is still the case until
we are upstreamed. You can help us in this effort in ~Development in our
Mattermost.

Updates

Updates released since upstream are posted across our current
architectures. We strongly recommend that all users apply all updates,
including the content released today on your existing Rocky Linux
machines. This can be done by running dnf update.

All Rocky Linux components are built from the sources hosted at
git.rockylinux.org. In addition, SRPMs are being published alongside the
repositories in a corresponding “source” directory. You can find these
on any of our mirrors. These source packages match every binary RPM we
release.

Note that this release supersedes all previously released content for
Rocky Linux 8. You are encouraged to update your system. Older content,
such as those obsoleted from the previous release will not be available.
While we keep older content around for historical purposes (within our
vault), it is recommended that you use the latest updates available to
you.

Please allow mirrors to sync the content. While most of our mirrors have synced majority of the content, not all has been synced and you may not get your updates right away.

Download

GNOME (Workstation): https://dl.rockylinux.org/pub/rocky/8/Live/x86_64/Rocky-Workstation-8-x86_64-20220515.1.iso
XFCE: https://dl.rockylinux.org/pub/rocky/8/Live/x86_64/Rocky-XFCE-8-x86_64-20220515.4.iso
Checksum: https://dl.rockylinux.org/pub/rocky/8/Live/x86_64/CHECKSUM
Verification: https://dl.rockylinux.org/pub/rocky/8/Live/x86_64/CHECKSUM.sig

Note: KDE images are not available. There was an issue with sddm that we
were unable to resolve. If you would like to help us resolve this,
please join us at our mattermost or open a PR on our github here:

Additional Images

Generic Cloud Images:

Container Images

Container images for Rocky Linux 8.6 are available on Quay.io as well as Docker.io in both the Official Library and in the rockylinux organization. In addition to the standard image available for 8.4 and 8.5, we are pleased to be able to offer a Minimal image built with only the necessary tools to use a Rocky Linux container and customize to your needs. The containers are about 30MB compressed, and just under 100MB when extracted. In addition, the Minimal image ships microdnf as a drop in replacement for the dnf package manager.

Additional images for Vagrant as well as Oracle Cloud and Microsoft Azure will be published in the coming days.

Special Thanks

We are grateful to the many Rocky Linux project volunteers and leaders for producing, testing, and documenting this release.

The Release Engineering and Testing teams bear the brunt of the workload for new releases, and in particular for the release of Rocky Linux 8.6:

  • Al Bowles
  • Louis Abel
  • Lukas Magauer
  • Mustafa Gezen
  • Neil Hanlon
  • Sherif Nagy
  • Skip Grube
  • Steven Spencer
  • Taylor Goodwill
  • Trevor Cooper

We are thankful for the development work in Fedora Linux, the curation efforts in CentOS Stream, and the countless developers and their projects from which these distributions are built

Getting Help / Engaging with the Community

The Rocky Linux ecosystem is sustained by community-driven help,
guidance, and love of RPM distributions, Enterprise Linux and
its ecosystem. The best place to start for new users is at
https://docs.rockylinux.org.

You can communicate with us and other community members on various
mediums:

Mattermost: https://chat.rockylinux.org
Reddit: https://reddit.com/r/rockylinux
Forums: https://forums.rockylinux.org
Mail list: https://lists.resf.org
Libera IRC: #rockylinux

Bug Tracker: https://bugs.rockylinux.org

Thank you, and enjoy the release!

Louis Abel
Release Engineering

8 Likes
4

congratulations Rocky team well done :partying_face: and thanks a lot for your nice work and have a nice day everyone

1 Like
5

Good YT video here (link below) discussing the release - kicked off the upgrade on my primary Rocky image while watching.

dnf -y upgrade

Whole process took about 20 min using 2 AMD Ryzen 9 cores, 4 GB RAM on whatever SSD is in the notebook. Running VirtualBox on a Win host (apologies).

First reboot (from KDE) took a while (got hung up on terminating user login) - but afterward, all good. Well done!