The CentOS Project announced today an end to a classic CentOS Linux as you know it, ending an era of CentOS as a RHEL rebuild. CentOS 8 will continue as a Stream version that you should upgrade to before the end of 2021. Here’s how.
First, if you missed it, here is the announcement by CentOS Project. And here is some more on how CentOS Stream will become the upstream of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
If you are on CentOS 8, you should switch over to CentOS Stream 8 sooner or later. CentOS Stream should provide roughly the same system with the following differences:
- Support for security and bug fixes in Stream will be roughly 4 years (from 10). Clarification on supported time.
- Major versions (8, 9) will track ahead of Red Hat Enterprise Linux releases.
- You will be upgraded to each minor version in an rolling-release fashion.
- There might be issues with some EPEL packages (EPEL is Fedora’s responsibility).
To upgrade, install centos-release-stream package from extras repository:
$ sudo dnf install centos-release-stream
Last metadata expiration check: 1:27:40 ago on Tue 08 Dec 2020 01:58:10 PM UTC.
Dependencies resolved.
================================================================================
Package Arch Version Repository Size
================================================================================
Installing:
centos-release-stream x86_64 8.1-1.1911.0.7.el8 extras 11 k
Transaction Summary
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Install 1 Package
Total download size: 11 k
Installed size: 6.6 k
Is this ok [y/N]:
Then run dnf swap to swap repositories followed by dnf distro-sync:
$ sudo dnf swap centos-{linux,stream}-repos
$ sudo dnf distro-sync
The distro-sync subcommand is used to synchronize installed packages to the latest versions on upgrades. When no argument is provided, dnf updates all packages from active repositories.
And that’s it. You should be on CentOS Stream 8!
$ sudo cat /etc/centos-release
CentOS Stream release 8
