RockyLinux notes

5 May 2024

These are my notes regarding RockyLinux. Some notes will probably also be relevant to similar distros.

Package manager — installing stuff

DNF vs. YUM

Both YUM (Yellowdog Updater, Modified) and DNF (Dandified YUM) borrow the RPM (Red Hat Package Manager) package format to perform package management tasks like installing, updating and removing packages. This is why the syntax is very similar.

Basically Yum Package Manager has been replaced by the DNF Package Manager, because many long-standing issues in Yum remoain unsolved. DNF has following improvements over YUM:

• Support for rollback transactions.
• Support for package metadata.
• Better performance and dependency resolution.
• New, faster, and more efficient database format.
• Better multiple version handling mechanisms for packages.

So use DNF!

Installing a specific version

RockyLinux uses thoroughly tested software by default. This means that if you want to run newer versions, you have to explicitly select it. To enable a different version, there's a sequence of commands you need to run through.

Here's an example where I wanted to install PHP 8.2:

sudo dnf module list php
sudo dnf module reset php
sudo dnf module enable php:remi-8.2
sudo dnf install php

Crontab in nano

I prefer nano. It's simply and I know it.

EDITOR=nano crontab -e

Install Neofetch

Who doesn't love a good Neofetch dump?

git clone https://github.com/dylanaraps/neofetch
cd neofetch
make install