14 DAY TRIAL // The CentOS development team, through Karanbir Singh, had the pleasure of announcing the immediate availability for download of the award-winning CentOS 7 Linux operating system, which is based on publicly available sources of the recently released Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 distribution.
CentOS 7 is a community-derived Linux OS designed with both desktop and server deployment in mind. This release comes with a brand new numbering scheme, which allows its developers to release regular maintenance releases each month.
“We would like to announce the general availability of CentOS Linux 7 for 64 bit x86 compatible machines. This is the first release for CentOS-7 and is version marked as 7.0-1406 First, please read through the release notes at : http://wiki.centos.org/Manuals/ReleaseNotes/CentOS7.”
“These notes contain important information about the release and details about some of the content inside the release from the CentOS QA team. These notes are updated constantly to include issues and incorporate feedback from the users,” Karanbir Singh said in the official release announcement.
Major changes include an updated Linux kernel (version 3.10.0), support for Linux containers, out-of-the-box support for 3D graphics drivers and VMWare Tools, XFS as the default filesystem, OpenJDK as the default Java environment, FirewallD as the default firewall, systemd as the default init system, and GRUB2 as the default bootloader.
In addition, CentOS 7 comes with support for LVM snapshots for the XFS and EXT4 filesystems, support for version 2 of the Precision Time Protocol (PTP), support for 40G Ethernet cards, support for UEFI Secure Boot, in-place upgrade from CentOS 6.5, and support for FCoE (Fibre Channel over Ethernet) and iSCSI.
“For the first time, this release was built from sources hosted at git.centos.org, however srpms being a byproduct of the build and also considered critical in the code and buildsys process are being published to match every rpm we release.”
“Sources will be available from vault.centos.org in their own dedicated directories to match the corrosponding binary rpms,” was stated in the official announcement for CentOS 7.
Download CentOS 7 right now from Softpedia. It is available for download as an installable-only DVD, Live CDs with the GNOME and KDE Plasma desktop environments, a net install CD, as well as an Everything DVD edition that contains all the packages and desktop environments that are available for CentOS, including the sources.
Upcoming releases of CentOS 7 will also feature ISO images with Docker support, cloud images for vendor ecosystems, including HP Cloud, RackSpace, AWS, Google Compute and others, cloud images for general consumption, which include OpenStack, OpenNebula, CloudStack, and Eucalyptus, a minimal install ISO image, as well as a community build system.