In a recent announcement, Rocky Linux 9.6 has been released. This distribution was created to provide a free alternative to RHEL and can be used as a replacement for RHEL 9.6 and CentOS 9 Stream. The binary distribution is compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux and will be supported until May 31, 2032. Installation ISO images of Rocky Linux are available for architectures X86_64, AARCH64, PPC64le, and S390X (IBM Z). Additionally, live assemblies with desktop environments such as GNOME, KDE, Cinnamon, and XFCE have been published for x86_64 architecture.
Similar to classic CentOS, Rocky Linux includes changes that focus on removing the RED HAT brand and specific packages for RHEL, such as Redhat-*, Insights-Client, and Subscript-Manager-Migration*. More details about the changes in Rocky Linux 9.6 can be found in the release notes.
Notable changes specific to Rocky Linux include the inclusion of Openldap 2.6.8, pyqt-Builder 1.12.2, and spirv-headers 1.5.5 in the plus repository. The nfv repository offers packages for virtualization of network components, developed by the SIG-group nfv. Rocky Linux also supports additional repositories like CRB, rt, highavailability, resilientstorage, sap, and saphana for various functionalities.
The development of Rocky Linux 9.6 involves sourcing packets from the Openla repository, which is supported in collaboration with Oracle and SUSE. This change in the development process is attributed to the cessation of RED HAT’s involvement in the initial texts of RPM packets for RHEL, which were previously hosted in the git.centos.org repository.