CentOS 8 released!

Today, the CentOS community released the much-awaited CentOS 8 (1905). RHEL 8 was released in May this year at the Red Hat Summit 2019. Users were highly anticipating this CentOS 8 rebuild. In CentOS 8, the community has partnered more closely with Fedora and will be sharing git repos with the Fedora system.

Highlights of CentOS 8

As the CentOS Linux distribution is a platform derived from the sources of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), it conforms fully with Red Hat’s redistribution policy and aims to have full functional compatibility with the upstream product.

Version control system and Database servers

It will provide version control systems such as Git 2.18, Mercurial 4.8, and Subversion 1.10. Database servers such as MariaDB 10.3, MySQL 8.0, PostgreSQL 10, PostgreSQL 9.6, and Redis 5 have been included.

GNOME Shell

GNOME Shell has been rebased to version 3.28. The GNOME session and the GNOME Display Manager use Wayland as their default display server. The X.Org server, which is the default display server in RHEL 7, is available as well.

Cryptography policies

System-wide cryptographic policies, which configures the core cryptographic subsystems, covering the TLS, IPsec, SSH, DNSSEC, and Kerberos protocols, are applied by default.

Python updates

As Python 3.6 is the default Python implementation in RHEL 8, CentOS may get similar Python default updates. Also, limited support for Python 2.7 may be provided. No version of Python is installed by default.

To know about all the highlights in detail, read the upstream Release Notes

Deprecated functionalities

Assuming the deprecations in RHEL 8, similar CentOS 8 features have been deprecated.

• The –interactive option of the ignoredisk Kickstart command has been deprecated.
• NFSv3 over UDP has been disabled.
• Digital Signature Algorithm (DSA) and Network scripts have been deprecated.
• TLS 1.0 and TLS 1.1 are deprecated

To know more about the deprecated functionalities read the upstream documentation.

Removed security functionality

• The Clevis HTTP pin has been removed
• shadow-utils no longer allow all-numeric user and group names
• securetty is now disabled by default

To know more about the other removed security functionalities, read the upstream documentation.

Known issues in CentOS 8

• If the user is planning to install CentOS-8 in a VirtualBox guest, you should not select “Server with a GUI” (default) during the installation.
• Support for some adapters have been removed CentOS-8. ELRepo offers driver update disks (DUD) for some of those that are still commonly used. For the list of the device IDs provided by the ELRepo packages, please see here.
• Once CentOS-8 is installed, you can use the centosplus kernel (kernel-plus) which has support for those devices.
• While using the boot.iso and NFS to install, the automatic procedure for adding the AppStream-Repo will fail. You have to disable it and add the right NFS-path manually.

To install and use CentOS 8 (1905), a minimum of 2 GB RAM is required. The community members recommend at least 4 GB RAM for it to function smoothly.

To know more about CentOS 8 in detail, read CentOS wiki page.

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