Home Rocky Linux Rocky Linux 9 Released – Download DVD ISO Images

Rocky Linux 9 Released – Download DVD ISO Images

Ever since it was released as a successor to CentOS 8 which was prematurely discontinued, Rocky Linux has proven to be a reliable, and formidable operating system for handling enterprise-grade workloads.

It’s completely free and open-source and 100% bug-to-bug compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux. It provides rock-solid stability for enterprise workloads, regular updates, and a 10-year support cycle.

Rocky Linux 9 is the latest release and was made available on July 14. 2022, and users can now download the ISO image and install it on their servers. It ships with a number of improvements and enhancements which we shall look at shortly.

Major Changes in Rocky Linux 9

Being 100% bug-to-bug compatible with RHEL, major changes that come with Rocky Linux 9 are in line with those that come with RHEL 9.

Here are the major highlights of Rocky Linux 9.

Updated Language Runtimes and Developer Tools

Rocky Linux 9 ships with the latest language runtimes and compilers, which include:

  • GCC 11.2.1
  • LLVM 13.0.1
  • Rust 1.58.1
  • Go 1.17.1

In addition, it comes with updated versions of developer toolchains which include:

  • glibc 2.34
  • binutils 2.35

Newer Web Programming Languages Versions

Rocky Linux 9.0 also ships with the latest versions of web-related and dynamic programming applications and version control packages.

Here is a list of some of the notable applications.

Dynamic Programming
  • PHP 8.0
  • Python 3.9
  • Perl 5.32
  • Ruby 3.0
  • Node.JS 16
Web Servers
  • Apache HTTP webserver 2.4.51
  • Nginx 1.20
Version Control
  • Git 2.31
  • Subversion 1.14
Database Servers
  • MySQL 8.0
  • MariaDB 10.5
  • PostgreSQL 13
  • Redis 6.2
Compiler Toolsets
  • Rust Toolset 1.58.1
  • LLVM Toolset 13.0.1
  • Go Toolset 1.17.7

Security Enhancements

Rocky Linux 9.0 has seen a couple of security most notably:

  • SELinux Improvements – Memory overhead, loading time, and performance have been substantially improved.
  • OpenSSH 8.7 p 1 is the latest version. Notable improvements include the replacement of SCP/RCP protocol with SFTP protocol which offers solid encryption and more predictable handling of filenames.
  • OpenSSL 3.0.1 is the newest version. It provides improvements such as a new versioning scheme, support for new protocols & algorithms, and an improved HTTP(S) client among many others.
  • Deprecation of SHA-1 message digest for cryptographic purposes. The hash functions associated with SHA-1 are no longer considered secure.

Filesystem Improvements

The XFS filesystem now supports Direct Access (DAX) operations allowing direct access to byte-addressable persistent memory. This helps to avoid the latency of leveraging traditional block I/O conventions. Additionally, NGS introduces an “eager write” mount option for minimizing latency.

GNOME 40

In Rocky Linux 9, GNOME 40 is the default desktop environment. GNOME 40 is freshly redesigned to provide a sleeker UI for a desktop operating system. Now more than ever, it’s much easier to launch your applications and arrange your personal workspace.

Notable improvements for desktop usage include:

  • Fractional display scaling.
  • Ability to group applications into folders using the drag and drop method thanks to the revamped ‘Activities‘ application.
  • Ability to mute notifications by toggling on “Do not disturb” which appears as a separate button in the notification.
  • The different refresh rates for every screen.

Download Rocky Linux 9 DVD ISO Images

Rocky Linux 9, just like Rocky Linux 8 provides DVD, Minimal, and Boot ISO images. The images are provided for the following architectures: x86_64, ARM64 (aarch64), s390x, and ppc64le.

Head over to the Rocky Linux Official Download Page to download any of the Rocky Linux 9 ISO images.

That’s it for this article. All the best as you try out Rocky Linux 9.

Ravi Saive
I am an Experienced GNU/Linux expert and a full-stack software developer with over a decade in the field of Linux and Open Source technologies. Founder of TecMint.com, LinuxShellTips.com, and Fossmint.com. Over 150+ million people visited my websites.

Each tutorial at UbuntuMint is created by a team of experienced writers so that it meets our high-quality standards.

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