The release of the CentOS 2105 distribution has been announced, incorporating changes from Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.4. The distribution is fully binary compatible with RHEL 8.4. CentOS 2105 builds are prepared (8 GB DVD and 605 MB netboot) for x86_64, Aarch64 (ARM64), and ppc64le architectures. The SRPMS packages, on the basis of which the binaries were built, and debuginfo are available through vault.centos.org.
In addition to the new features introduced in RHEL 8.4, CentOS 2105 has modified the contents of 34 packages, including anaconda, dhcp, firefox, grub2, httpd, kernel, PackageKit, and yum. Changes to these packages generally involve rebranding and redesign. RHEL-specific packages, such as redhat-*, insights-client, and subscription-manager-migration*, have been removed.
As with RHEL 8.4, additional AppStream modules with updated versions of Python 3.9, SWIG 4.0, Subversion 1.14, Redis 6, PostgreSQL 13, MariaDB 10.5, LLVM Toolset 11.0.0, Rust Toolset 1.49.0, and Go Toolset 1.15.7 have been created for CentOS 8.4. The bootable ISO images resolve an issue where users were required to manually enter the mirror URL for downloading packages. In the new release, the installer automatically selects the closest mirror to the user.
In the continuously updated CentOS Stream edition, which will replace classic CentOS 8 by the end of the year, the ability to rollback to previous package versions using the 'dnf downgrade' command has been implemented, provided that multiple versions of an application exist in the repository. The migration capabilities from CentOS 8 to CentOS Stream continue to be developed. Efforts have been made to unify the naming of the repositories (repoid), which are now in lowercase (for example, 'AppStream' has been replaced with 'appstream'). To transition to CentOS Stream, it is sufficient to change the names of some files in the /etc/yum.repos.d directory, update the repoid, and adjust the usage of the '--enablerepo' and '--disablerepo' flags in your scripts.
Known issues:
- When installing in VirtualBox, select the 'Server with GUI' mode and use VirtualBox version 6.1 or newer, or 6.0.14 or 5.2.34;
- Support for certain hardware devices that may still be relevant has been discontinued in RHEL 8. A possible solution is to use the centosplus kernel and the iso images prepared by the ELRepo project with additional drivers;
- The automated procedure for adding the AppStream-Repo does not work when using boot.iso and installing via NFS;
- PackageKit cannot determine local DNF/YUM variables.
As an alternative to the classic CentOS 8, VzLinux (prepared by Virtuozzo), AlmaLinux (developed by CloudLinux in collaboration with the community), Rocky Linux (developed by the community under the guidance of the founder of CentOS with support from the newly created company Ctrl IQ), and Oracle Linux are positioned. Additionally, Red Hat has provided the option for free use of RHEL in organizations developing open-source software and for individual developers with up to 16 virtual or physical systems.
Source: opennet.ru
