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NAME

Rocky Linux - A Community Enterprise Operating System

DESCRIPTION

Rocky Linux is a community enterprise operating system designed and built to be binary compatible with the world’s top enterprise Linux distribution, Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Rocky Linux is a project under the Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation.

HISTORY OF THE NAME

The name "Rocky" was chosen as a tribute to Rocky McGaugh, a co-founder of CentOS.

GOALS

Rocky Linux, as a distribution, has a primary goal of being a community enterprise distribution that the world can install and use to their liking, as an alternative to Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) or another Enterprise Linux derivative. As a community, there are other goals for Rocky (from our Community Charter missions):

More information is in our community charter found at /usr/share/doc/rocky-release/COMMUNITY-CHARTER and https://rockylinux.org/community-charter/

COMMUNICATION

There are many ways you can communicate with the community.

WHY?

You’re probably wondering what this is for, whether you found it on accident or you were hunting for easter eggs.

It was your average monday with standup with Release Engineering. We were discussing the path to what would be 8.4 and what’s next, whether that was patches we needed to do at the time and PR’s upstream to reduce future work. It got us thinking about easter eggs to put into the distribution. Nothing too crazy, just the small things. Things that we would hope would be found and perhaps shared through our various communication mediums (such as twitter and mattermost). So this man page was born as a direct result of those ideas.

Now you might be asking yourself, ’well where does the name come in?’ That’s also a good question, because originally we weren’t going to have a code name for our releases. We realized really quickly that we should add one to satisfy vendors (and others in the community that expect one), instead of putting a name somewhere and hoping someone would find it. While that last part was technically still true, we figured it wouldn’t hurt to add one. The code names don’t affect the functionality of the distribution. To be honest, I see them as aesthetics more than anything. In the end, we all thought it was a good idea and decided we should put one in and use that to push forward core themes and ideas for the major version.

’Why didn’t you just name them based on characters from Rocky Balboa?’ We really did consider that during the Green Obsidian days. "Rocky" managed to create its own set of memes when it started (some of the memes were pretty good). It almost seemed fitting that we’d use a name from the series. Realistically though, we’d run out of names. We could’ve named Rocky 8 "Adrian" (secretly it is) and left it be. But instead, we decided let’s use the names of actual rocks/minerals. I also figured that we can’t just use a rock name. Rocks have colors or other adjectives that describe them.

(Secretly we have internal code names based on the movies, but don’t tell anyone)

Blue Onyx was chosen for our 9 release. Onyx is a variety of stone that comes from chalcedony, a silicate mineral made of calcite (similar to marble or granite). Onyx usually features contrasting layers of color. Onyx has parallel bands that can range from black to almost every color, with black and white being the most common. Blue Onyx in this case is a special variety of the onyx stone. For those who know their color theory, you may already know that blue is a calming, serene color that represents intelligence, responsibility, tranquility, trustworthiness, peacefulness, among many other things. Blue Onyx as itself is a provider of strength and support. Choosing blue as this release’s color felt like the right choice as the community has trusted and believed in our pursuit to bring to them a community-based Enterprise Linux distribution.

Before I let you go, I want to personally thank you for installing Rocky Linux. This distribution would not be possible without the hard work, dedication, and passion of the community to want to keep an always free Enterprise Linux distribution. We hope that you enjoy using this distribution and continue to support us in the future.

AUTHOR

Louis Abel <label@rockylinux.org> @nazunalika

SPECIAL THANKS

Mustafa Gezen - For the amazing Peridot build system and the utilities Rocky uses

Neil Hanlon - For empowering our build system and community with POWER and Z systems to match upstream

Sherif Nagy - Without you, secure boot for Rocky Linux would not be possible.

Chris Stackpole and the rest of the Testing Team - For continuously working on a testing suite that can be used for all versions and variants of Rocky going forward

Peter Ajamian - Maintaining the migration tools and assisting the community in IRC and Forums whenever possible.

Pablo Greco - Providing a wealth of knowledge and expertise in architecture and overall package building

Skip and Everyone in the Mattermost Dev channel - For discovering and assisting on build issues for 9 (and likely beyond)

... and you: The Community, for supporting and believing in this project.

SEE ALSO

COPYRIGHT

2022, Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation, Licensed under the 3-Clause BSD License