Step by step, with screenshots: the Fedora kickstart walkthrough works the same way for Rocky Linux.

Downstream of RHEL, not upstream like Fedora

Rocky Linux is built to be binary-compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux and follows RHEL's releases. That's the reverse of Fedora, where new packages and kernels land first and flow into RHEL later. If you test in a VM to catch problems before they reach a RHEL-family server, Rocky is the closer match. Fedora will show you problems Rocky won't have yet, and hide ones it will.

Rocky Linux 10 or 9, three ways

Velo Workspaces 1.2 has Rocky Linux 10 and 9 in its catalog, downloaded from rockylinux.org and checked against Rocky's published checksums:

  • Cloud image. The GenericCloud Base image. cloud-init creates your account and adds this Mac's SSH key on first boot, and it's ready in about a minute. Velo Workspaces uses Base rather than the LVM variant because cloud-init can grow a plain partition to the disk size you chose, but not an LVM volume.
  • Automatic install. The Minimal or DVD ISO with Automatic installation on. As with Fedora, Anaconda finds the kickstart file on a disk labelled OEMDRV and installs without asking anything.
  • By hand. The same ISOs with automatic installation off give you Anaconda's normal screens.

The Minimal ISO (about 2 GB) is plenty for a VM. The DVD carries every package for offline installs and is several times larger.

What carries over from Fedora, and what doesn't

Rocky and Fedora share a lot: dnf, the Anaconda installer, NetworkManager, and SELinux enforcing by default, so everything in the Fedora post about AVC denials applies unchanged. Neither ships update-binfmts, so Rosetta is registered the Fedora way, through systemd-binfmt; the support FAQ has the steps.

What differs is the release model. Rocky's packages are older by design, chosen for RHEL compatibility rather than novelty, and each major release is supported for about ten years: Rocky Linux 9 until 2032, Rocky Linux 10 until 2035.

A good fit for disposable workspaces

Save a configured Rocky workspace as a base image and each test run can start from a clone of it: the same packages your production servers run, and a clean state every time. The QA and DevOps workflow post walks through the pattern.

Related reading: Fedora on Apple Silicon, the closer relative worth reading alongside this one; Ubuntu on Apple Silicon; and what a disposable development environment is. Or download Velo Workspaces and try it yourself.