Rocky Linux, one of the latest new CentOS clones, has announced that his project aims to release a working release sometime in the second quarter of 2021.
Rocky Linux came about when the CentOS project, owned by Red Hat, recently shifted focus, much to the annoyance of users.
Gregory Kurtzer, one of CentOS’s original co-founders, announced Rocky Linux to give stranded users a viable option to migrate their servers to before the current release of CentOS ends prematurely in December 2021.
In a blog post, Jordan Pisaniello, community manager of Rocky Linux wrote that the team is working on giving users a working release to replace their existing CentOS 8 installations before it expires next December.
Pisaniello also shared the project’s progress in the three weeks since it was announced. The core members of the team are founded in the US and will soon be moving an application to register it as a nonprofit.
He also said a number of companies have offered to sponsor the project in the form of developers, hardware, cloud instances and money. The team selected Amazon Web Services (AWS) as the primary build platform for developing the distro and is in talks with the Oregon State University Open Source Lab (OSUOSL) for resource sharing.
While CentOS / Red Hat continue to defend the move, users are already looking ahead to moving to alternatives. One of the main discussions on Rocky Linux’s highly active forums concerns the tooling for converting existing CentOS installations to Rocky Linux to support migrations, after its release in 2021.
This shouldn’t be much of a challenge, however, and could perhaps take the same approach as Oracle Linux (another high-profile CentOS alternative), which has published a script to convert existing CentOS installations to Oracle Linux.
Through: ZDNet