CentOS Alternative Rocky Linux 8.5 Is Out Now with Secure Boot Support, Updated Components

Rocky Linux 8.5

The Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation proudly announced today the general availability of Rocky Linux 8.5 as yet another free and open-source CentOS alternative based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Derived from Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.5, Rocky Linux 8.5 is here to introduce an important feature for the mass adoption of this CentOS Linux alternative, namely Secure Boot support.

This is the first release of Rocky Linux to include the official Rocky Linux signed Secure Boot shim, but users need to validated it to ensure that it’s properly activated. As such, the developers ask users to run a few commands after installing Rocky Linux 8.5.

sudo dnf install -y keyutils
sudo keyctl show %:.platform
sudo mokutil --sb

“There was an amazing amount of work and collaboration that went into this release. The Rocky Release Engineering team went far and above the call of duty to make 8.5 a reality so quickly,” said developer Gregory Kurtzer.

In addition to Secure Boot support, the Rocky Linux 8.5 release switches to the FastestMirror DNF plugin for providing users with the fastest mirror during network installation, which means that there’s no need for a Repository URL when using the Boot-only media.

On top of that, users will now find the Mozilla Thunderbird open-source email client with PGP support and openldap-servers in the plus repository, as well as a rasperrypi2 kernel for Raspberry Pi specific AArch64 support in the rockypi repository.

This release also brings new modules, including Ruby 3.0, nginx 1.20, and Node.js 16, as well as updated components from the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.5 release, including GCC 11, LLVM 12.0.1, Rust 1.54.0, Go 1.16.7, PHP 7.4.19, Squid 4.15, Mutt 2.0.7, OpenJDK 11.0.13 and 8.0.312, and many others.

It also inherits many of the new features and enhancements from RHEL 8.5, such as an enhanced Cockpit web console, better support for containerized applications, new system roles, Network Time Security (NTS) support for NTP, and support for OpenJDK 17.

You can download Rocky Linux 8.5 right now from the official website as DVD (Full), Minimal or Boot ISO images for 64-bit (x86_64) and AArch64 (ARM64) hardware architectures. Existing Rocky Linux 8.4 users need only to update their installations by running the sudo dnf -y upgrade command in a terminal emulator.

Image credits: Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation (edited by Marius Nestor)

Last updated 2 years ago

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