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Migrating CentOS to Rocky Linux with migrate2rocky

Safer Ground

Article from ADMIN 71/2022

By Artur Skura

CentOS users need to find a replacement soon. If you use CentOS 8 and you're looking for safer ground, the migrate2rocky script will automatically migrate your system to Rocky Linux – an enterprise RHEL derivative created by CentOS co-founder Greg Kurtzer.

Red Hat's announced re-envisioning of the popular CentOS Linux distribution [1] caused a major disruption in the Linux space. According to some surveys [2], CentOS was actually the third most popular Linux distribution in the world (after Ubuntu and Debian), and all those CentOS instances weren't just running on desktops. CentOS has carved out a role as a distro of choice for web servers, file servers, and even high-performance computing systems.

If you're wondering how the world will get along without CentOS, the first thing to know is that Red Hat didn't eliminate the CentOS brand , but they did move it upstream. CentOS used to be based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux source code, which meant that all the testing, troubleshooting, and verification that went into Red Hat's flagship distro also applied to CentOS. Now the CentOS developers will pull code from the RHEL development pipeline at an earlier point in the process, so it won't receive the value-added testing and verification that goes into RHEL. The newly named CentOS Stream distribution will fall somewhere between Fedora and RHEL in the development cycle, which significantly reduces its value to enterprise customers. Those thousands of CentOS users are now searching for a solution. Luckily, the Linux community specializes in in-flight adaptations to adjust to changing times. CentOS is not the only distribution based on RHEL source code. Some existed previously, and a few others launched after Red Hat's announcement. One of the newcomers is Rocky Linux [3]. The Rocky project, which launched one day after Red Hat announced that it was moving CentOS upstream, was started by one of the founders of CentOS, who envisions it as an enterprise-ready (and cluster-ready) alternative to RHEL. By now, most CentOS users know the clock is

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