14 DAY TRIAL // CentOS developer and maintainer Johnny Hughes is announcing today, January 30, 2017, the immediate availability of the latest CentOS 7.3 (1611) GNU/Linux operating system for the 32-bit (i386) hardware architecture.
If some of the most popular GNU/Linux distributions have started dropping support for 32-bit (i686/x86) installations or plan to do so in the near future, many are still installable on older computers from 10 years ago.
CentOS 7.3 (1611) is the latest addition to the list of 32-bit supported Linux-based operating systems, thanks to a group of hard working people from the CentOS AltArch SIG initiative trying to create alternative architecture support for CentOS Linux.
"This is the release announcement for the i386 (Intel 32-bit) Architecture based on the source code released for CentOS-7 (1611). It includes all packages that build on x86 32-bit processors," said Johnny Hughes in today's announcement.
GNOME and KDE Live ISO images now available for download
The good news, however, is that today's release of CentOS 7.3 (1611) Linux distro for 32-bit hardware architectures also comes with a couple of Live ISO images bundled with the GNOME and KDE desktop environments.
As such, you'll be able to test drive the operating system with either KDE or GNOME on your personal computer without installing anything on the local disk drive. Of course, DVD, Everything, Minimal, and NetInstall ISO images are also available for download.
Existing CentOS 7 32-bit users don't need to download anything, just open a terminal emulator and run the "yum update" command as root, which will automatically download and install the latest package versions.
We remind you that CentOS 7.3 (1611) is based on the freely distributed source code of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.3 and you can also download the official, 64-bit ISO images directly from our website if you want to install the operating system on your PCs.