May 2021

I’ve had alot of trouble on separate days even getting access to https://rockylinux.org – it must be so popular that it’s both overloaded and under resourced. Lurking in the forum’s it seems they are slower than Alma so much so they are really following their lead. The same issues about UEFI issues and grub on vsphere is there – mainly to do with the migration script not catering (or being able to cater) for these things.

Rocky Linux as of 17th May is still with RC (release candidate) status. So not really ready unless you are going to help out with bug finding. The RC release candidate went on fine enough, so did EPEL and Powertools repos. It installed the same kernel revision as AlmaLinux. I installed it on Parallels only.

Update August 2021

The migrate2rocky.sh script is working very well for me now. So basically:

dnf update
shutdown -r now
wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/rocky-linux/rocky-tools/main/migrate2rocky/migrate2rocky.sh
chmod u+x ./migrate2rocky.sh
./migrate2rocky.sh -r

The only gotcha for me was that /usr/bin/java link maintained by alternatives disappears. As I typically use the JRE I fix it:

alternatives --install /usr/bin/java  java /usr/lib/jvm/java-1.8.0-openjdk-1.8.0.302.b08-0.el8_4.x86_64/jre/bin/java 1 

It turns out its a <a href="https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1976053" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener"> known bug </a>and a better workaround is to run this:

rpm -qa --scripts java-{1.8.0,11}-openjdk-{headless,devel} | sed -n '/postinstall/, /exit/{ /postinstall/! { /exit/ ! p} }' | sh

Other than that it’s been going well for general LAMP, radius, java services.

I’ve also noticed that dnf –security update generally works now so there is alot more security patches being identified. This was a failure of CentOS for not picking up package metadata I’ve read. This has not raised the prospect of a more regular patch and reboot cycle which we are not so used to.