System Requirements - Linux

Linux Packages

Zixi Broadcaster expects the following Linux packages to be installed on RHEL 7 or equivalent:

# yum-utils net-tools wget tar ntp network-scripts telnet traceroute

Zixi Broadcaster expects the following Linux packages to be installed on RHEL 9 or equivalent:

# dnf-utils net-tools wget tar ntp telnet traceroute initscripts numactl ipcalc

These are RHEL package names; it may be necessary to determine equivalent package names if another OS is being used.

Hardware

CPU:
- Intel Pentium G5400 dual core, Celeron J3160 quad core, i3/i5/i7 dual core, Xeon quad core or above (Westmere and later micro architectures)
- AMD Ryzen and EPYC quad core or above;
- AWS Graviton2/3;
- Other ARMv8 64-bit (Raspberry Pi, Ampere, etc.)
RAM: 4GB RAM (minimum)
Networking: 1 Gigabit network card (minimum)

Recommended Operating System

Machine	OS
Intel/AMD X86	RHEL 7.9 or equivalent - CentOS 7.9, Oracle Linux 7.9 RHEL 8.9 or equivalent - CentOS 8.9, Oracle Linux 8.9 RHEL 9.3 or equivalent - Alma Linux 9.3, Rocky Linux 9.3, Oracle Linux 9.3 Amazon Linux 2023
Raspberry Pi 4	Ubuntu 20.04
Raspberry Pi 5	Ubuntu 23.10 (until 24.04 is released) Raspberry Pi OS Bookworm
AWS Graviton 2/3	Amazon Linux 2023

Zixi Broadcaster and ZEC require a 64-bit operating system; 32-bit is not supported.
Other 64-bit Linux distributions, such as Ubuntu, Debian, or their derivatives may work as well as long they as have glibc 2.14 or newer

Network config

Zixi Broadcaster is designed to allow the user to configure networking configs using capabilities provided by the network-scripts package. If the OS includes the network-scripts package (RHEL/CentOS 7), it should be installed and the NetworkManager package should be removed. If the OS does not include the network-scripts package (RHEL/CentOS 8 and later), then NetworkManager should be installed. In the latter case, Zixi Broadcaster will not have full capability to modify network configs, as show in the image below, and the user must do that through the OS command line.

**CentOS EOL Guidance

In December 2020, the CentOS community and Red Hat announced the sunset of CentOS. Red Hat also announced CentOS Stream, a new, upstream development platform for the CentOS community. For more information, see Transforming the development experience within CentOS.

What does this mean for CentOS users?

CentOS 7 and 8 are the final releases of CentOS Linux. The end of life dates for CentOS 7 and 8 are as follows:

CentOS 8 - December 31, 2021
CentOS 7 - June 30, 2024

If you have workloads that are currently running on these CentOS versions, you might want to review what options are available to you and start migrating your workloads.