How to install Rocky Linux 8.4?

Rocky Linux is a newly released Linux distribution that is intended to provide a community-supported production-grade enterprise operating system.

In Dec 2020 Redhat announced that it will discontinue the development of CentOS. In response to this original developers of CentOS starts another project to achieve the goals of CentOS. So Rocky Linux is considered as a replacement for CentOS.

In this guide, I will discuss the steps that you can follow to install Rocky Linux 8.4 “Green Obsidian” on your system.

Prerequisites

To follow this guide you should have the following –

A computer with at least 2 GB RAM, 20 GB hard disk, and a 64-bit processor.
A 16 GB pen drive to use as an installation medium.
Good internet connection for downloading Rocky Linux ISO file

Download Rocky Linux ISO file

For installing Rocky Linux you need its image file, to download the Rocky Linux iso file first go to the download page on its official website.

You can download one of the given setups of Rocky Linux.

Minimal – This is the minimal setup of Rocky Linux of size 2 GB
DVD – The DVD iso is around 9 GB in size
Boot – This is the network installer setup of around 700 MB
Torrent – If you want you can download the operating system by using a torrent client

OR use the given command to download minimal ISO of Rocky Linux in your terminal –

https://download.rockylinux.org/pub/rocky/8/isos/x86_64/Rocky-8.4-x86_64-minimal.iso

OR you can use the given command if you want to download DVD ISO of Rocky Linux –

wget https://download.rockylinux.org/pub/rocky/8/isos/x86_64/Rocky-8.4-x86_64-dvd1.iso

This will start the downloading Rocky Linux iso file.

Make USB bootable

Once the download is completed and you have the Rocky Linux ISO file, you need to make the USB bootable. You could use one of the given methods on your system to make your Pendrive bootable –

On Windows machine

If you are using a Windows system the best-recommended way to create a USB bootable is by downloading and using the Rufus application. This tool has a user-friendly GUI you can easily select your iso file and USB to make it bootable.

On a Linux system

If you are using a Linux system then you could use the dd command. To make USB bootable using this method first open your terminal by pressing ctrl+alt+t and then use –

sudo dd if=Rocky-8.4-x86_64-dvd1.iso of=/dev/sdb status=progress

Where Rocky-8.4-x86_64-dvd1.iso is the input file and /dev/sdb is the name of USB don’t forget to replace it with yours.

How to Install Rocky Linux

Now you have a Rocky Linux bootable USB drive insert it into your system and restart your system, press and hold F12. In most of the systems, it will display an option to boot from USB.

OR you can change the boot priority of the USB from the BIOS to by default boot from USB.

Now once your system boots into USB you will see the given screen.

To install choose the Install Rocky Linux 8 option and press enter. Now this will ask you to choose the language for the installation process, choose a language and click on Continue.

Next, it will display the installation summary window where you need to configure a few things.

As you can see broadly there are three columns LOCALIZATION, SOFTWARE, and SYSTEM.

We will start configuring from the column SYSTEM. First, click on the Installation Destination to choose between automatic or custom partitioning you can also mark the check box to encrypt your data.

I will recommend using automatic partitioning until you don’t know about the manual partitioning of a disk. After selecting the options click on Done.

The next option in this column is KDUMP, keep it to its default. Click on the Network & Host Name to configure the internet on your system. Here you can enable an existing network or add a new one. Once configured click on Done.

You can leave Security Policy as it is. Now in the SOFTWARE column click on the Software Selection option to choose what you want to install. Choose an option in the base environment and additional software and click on Done.

Now in the Localization column, click on Keyboard to configure the keyboard layout, Language Support to choose your language. Click on Time & Date to choose your time zone.

Below in the LOCALISATION column, you will see USER SETTINGS, click on Root Password to set a password and enable the root account. If you enter a weak password you need to click twice on Done.

If you want to create a new user then click on the User Creation this will open the window to fill in the details of the new user as given in the image below.

You can also mark Make this user administrator if you want to provide sudo privileges to this user.